Our grief matters – loss, grief, and mourning in Black vertically infected HIV-positive adolescents

Abstract

Within the South African context, psychoanalysis as praxis and research has not located itself outside of the country’s long, violent, and oppressive socio-political past. A major area in which psychoanalysis continues to demonstrate a deficit is in its lack of attention to race as constitutive of psychological development and a site of intense psychological pain. A further area that is often overlooked in both the theory and praxis of psychoanalysis in South Africa is the diseased body as a site of socio-political violence and oppression, and the subsequent impact of this trauma on intrapsychic development. This situation is particularly applicable in the development of Black children who are vertically infected with HIV. The focus of this article, the fourth in a series of five articles, is on the process of grief and mourning in three vertically infected HIV-positive adolescents. Findings indicate that children who are vertically infected with HIV suffer multiple losses leaving them with intense unprocessed grief despite having access to individual therapy. In addition, their raced subjectivities add to experiences of non-being leading to grief which remains minimised and overlooked within the psychoanalytic canon, keeping the mourning process hidden in historically oppressive systems as melancholia.