This paper intends to explore the psychic organizing function of sado-masochistic fantasies, in their fixed, unchanging form, for patients who have suffered early traumas, due to environmental vicissitudes and maternal psychopathology. The theoretical starting point is the Novicks' research into transitory and permanent beating fantasies in adult and child patients, their onset and their psychic function. They also examine Freud's paper “A child is being beaten“, and remark that the text achieves an unprecedented syncretism, locating the fantasy at the intersection between the oedipal and the fraternal complex. Reporting in some detail material from the analyses of two young women, whose clinical presentation and early traumas show some similarities, the Author puts in the context of the analytic work the emerging of the sado-masochistic fantasies, emphasizing their use and function in the transference-countertransference vicissitudes. The beating fantasies shore up a very precarious self, threatened with psychic depletion and death, in the area of the dead mother complex. Attention is focused on the fate of beating fantasies during the termination phase, and their role in making the analysis terminable or interminable. The Author explores the contribution of ameliorating factors, such as alternative identificatory figures, constitutional endowment and sublimatory capacities, to account for the different fate of fixed beating fantasies. Moreover, shame, as an essential affect in the constitution of subjectivity, its capacity to activate a libidinal investment of knowledge and language or, on the contrary, eliciting denial and avoidance of the Other's gaze is held to be an important factor in the terminability of the analysis.