Lidia s childhood was atypical, to say the least.

An "only child", she owed this peculiar filial status to a tragic event: the death under ambiguous circumstances of a baby who, had it not died during labor, would have been her elder sister; a sister, by the way, who was dead but not gone. This "girl" managed to live for a few hours, long enough to be baptized under the name of "Silvia" and died soon after. Yet as already stated, she did not disappear completely, as –among many other examples- the fact that the sequence of vowels in the names Silvia and Lidia is the same, determined the name of my patient, purposefully chosen by her parents as an ongoing tribute to Silvia s memory.

The mother, called Pilar, never recovered from the loss, and it may not be far fetched to guess that an endless mourning developed on the basis of what today would be called a clear psychotic outbreak.

Truth is, Pilar could not handle her daughter s upbringing, or she could barely manage it, so she needed to summon the help of her mother and her two sisters, Sara and Noemí, two unmarried and childless women who saw in Lidia the last chance to exercise some kind of motherhood, a task for which they had all the determination and the enthusiasm Pilar lacked.

Thus, Sara was convinced that Lidia deserved to have been born a boy. So whenever she took her niece out or invited her to her house… she would call her "Carlitos" [1], dress her up as a little boy and encourage her to play football and other boy games.

On the other hand, Noemí dreamed of a glamorous destiny for Lidia, something to do with "show-business": she used to teach her niece herself and also paid for her singing and dance lessons, made her up as a doll, volunteered her for TV appearances... etcetera.

Decades later, already in her middle forties and under psychoanalytic treatment with me, Lidia retells the fierce arguments held over and over again by her mother Pilar and her aunts Sara and Noemí: ruthless arguments in which everyone went against everyone else. Lidia s father refrained from taking part in these "women affairs", busy as he was building up a small fortune, tending to a local grocery store first , then to a supermarket.

During the course of her free association, signed as usual by an overflowing passion, I suddenly realize that she is attributing the arguments to "my three aunts". I then come out of my methodological distraction –also called "evenly-suspended attention" in treatises on psychoanalytic technique- to say: "How come three aunts? Were there not two aunts?". The loudest of silences ensued and then ended with an interpretation Lidia herself proposed and which, as time has already shown, would change the course of her life.

She says, emphatically: "Sure, since I did not have a mother!".

This vignette is intended as a commentary, from a clinical perspective, of Jacques Lacan s early statement that "...exactness must be distinguished from truth..."[2]. It is indeed inaccurate to say that Lidia has had three aunts, but one must first examine that which is inaccurate in order to uncover the truth, so that the healing effect of what has been subjectively believed to be true may follow.