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

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.