With the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, one nears the summits of medico-scientific phantasmagoria. Summits in the incoherence forced to always be subjected to graft amendments (virus mutations, hazy co-factors, co-locks, …), summits in the course of publications being only equalled in mass by infertility, summits in the art of keeping up the anxiety the echo of which reverberates in an all-round mediatisation. The preventive information even has a taste of propaganda, well established in the spirit of this new yellow star at the end of the century. Fortunately, the appealing witness of all long-term survivors (the term of which prolongs in parallel with the continuance of the dogma!), and the more numerous researchers questioning the theory remain … as does the hope for a demystification by means of the media.

The reader wishing to deepen the subject can read the booklet dedicated to it (N° 92 of November-December 1992. See the LINKS feature, Sida et Santé) since we will only take up the major lines here. What is called A.I.D.S. is not a precise disease, but a cocktail of pre-existing affections the explanation of which would only reside in the deficiency of our immune defence system. A system we have already taken up in the fourth biological law and that will come back in the next chapter. Taking into account the biological laws, a basic conflict should be distinguished from all subsequent ones.

The basic conflict lies among the answers to these questions: what is the impact on psychism of an individual learning that he is seropositive? Who finds himself condemned to death without knowing the exact meaning of the word? Who might, moreover, lead the others to the same end? Who has to give up the natural and spontaneous practice of intimate relationships? Who is constantly medicated and put aside by society? He is the only one who can answer these questions, but listening to seropositives always reveal a, more or less expressed, distress. A distress oscillating, with the diversity of the reactions proper to each case, between a desperate retirement within oneself and an assumed resignation but with the feeling of Damocles’ sword hanging over him (what we will call a conflict in balance ready to reactivate at the slightest occasion). Rather than a specific conflict, one should talk about an experience that could take different colours: experience of feeling diminished, limited, handicapped, destructured (devalorisation conflict); experience of feeling contaminated, soiled, dirtied (conflict of an attack to one’s integrity); experience of fear, insecurity, threat (conflict of fear); experience of rejection, isolation (separation conflict).

The continuation even so obeys the iron law in order to understand the appearance of the affections and to decode their symptoms. The vicious circle and especially the iatrogenous impact are present more than ever, because if a seropositive will only experience the diseases subsequent to his conflict (as does a seronegative), those diseases are potentially the reason for other conflicts. And the ever unexplainable passage of simple seropositivity to the "installed disease" rests most often on the experience of the diagnosis: after months or years of rather easily assumed seropositivity, one may live some kind of conflict reflecting on the entire body , according to the biological laws. If the relation to seropositivity is established by the scientific and taken for granted by the patient, the sword in suspension up to now transpierces him and this means the starting point of an end able to occur in a short while.

This "involvement" is analogous to the one of cancer. The presence of a new tumour easily explains itself as a metastasis of the mother tumour (being itself unexplained, …) and this diagnosis of cancer extension entails a new conflict. Even so, a pneumonia with a seropositive who has overcome a death feeling following the decease of a friend, will not only be a pneumonia, but the manifestation of the worsening of his disease; hence the conflictual relapse. In brief, one law for one’s friends and another one for one’s foes – in the diagnosis, the prognosis and the treatment – according to the presence or absence of a tumour or of previous antibodies…

In the unhappy evolution of seropositive patients, many of their histories resemble infernal spirals he can not easily escape. Without considering the conflicts having preceded this heavy diagnosis, the latter is often enough to start the spiral; giving then rise to the conflict of devalorisation, fear, separation, etc… And when this conflict is solved, the risk of seeing the recovery symptoms being interpreted as a sign of the disease and of engendering the vicious circle by a reactivation of the conflict exists. There are then all the conflicts in our present society that an individual having such a medical identification card may experience: always involving the same danger of vicious circle each time one of these conflicts is solved. And, in the meantime, life goes on independently of A.I.D.S. i.e. with the conflicts of each one of us; but here too, the organic consequences of these conflicts or of their solution may be dramatically interpreted and emphasise the spiral. Finally, it is the accumulation, the persistence and the entangling of all those conflicts in different stages (i.e. active conflicts not easy to live and reparation phases often hard to live and risking to maintain the vicious circle) progressively leading the individual to its personal survival limits…