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On the threshold of loss and its representations: masochism as a safeguard against depressive disorder

ABSTRACT This article explores defensive modes of masochism based through the case study of Sarah, a 25–year–old patient who is regularly followed in psychoanalytical therapy. I will postulate the idea that fetishization of moral masochism should be seen from the perspective of melancholic processes. Drawing on several moments of her therapy, I will illustrate how the primitive idealization of the introjected and denigrated object in the melancholic process lays the conditions for a decisive moral masochism, and whose unconscious idealization defends against depressive breakdown.