(Accepted for publication 29 October 2014)

Although she experienced, as did the many psychoanalysts before her, the countertransferential dynamics of disgust towards a patient presenting great deficiency in terms of mentalization capacity, the author strives to understand what urged her to tolerate the patient, to invest in her and lead her to develop a capacity for internalization, after 6 years of analytic work filled with transgressive-transferential acting-out. Fourteen years later, she becomes aware of the way in which the revival of some grief related to traumatic traces in her own lived experience, sustained, without her knowledge, a saviour/countertransference, creating a specific transferential-countertransferential spiral which rescued a situation whose advent could have been compromised. This could happen thanks to what she refers to as the unique inter-relation between her and this particular patient.