By deciphering three sessions of analytical psychotherapy during an early phase of treatment of an AIDS-infected patient, the author intends to show how, faced with the fragmentary world seen by a person in an extreme situation, that is, fear of the development of an internal phenomenon which brings him closer to death, the psychoanalyst is led to allow a virtual world develop within himself that challenges reality. Under the form of metaphors, or “figures of images,” which allow the installation of a framework for treatment, a relationship of exchange and the progress of analytical work are made possible. Analytic work is considered from both the point of view of representations that occur and of affective movements of a transferentialcountertransferential nature.
Extreme; AIDS; psychoanalysis; countertransference