This article is based on the practice of a clinical psychologist working with HIV patients, which I decided to place outside classical semiology, postulating a “pathology of the limbos of the symbolic.” I show how the use of tests cannot be separated from the demands of a clinic of subjectivity, giving such tests – considered “dialectic inversions” and scansions of discourse – their legitimate place in a clinic of speech and language. The proposal of prosthetic narrative supports could encourage the occurrence of a symptomatic function, an act of “auterization” by the revival of symbolic working out of the trauma, appeal to memory work, and the reconstruction of a story that had hitherto remained without an addressee, in limbos.
Limbo of the symbolic; tests (projective, personality…); symptomatic