Laura is a mature aged woman who sought analysis because of severe anxiety conditions, panic attacks and somatization. The analytic work allowed her to verbalize the emotional intensity of her experiences and highlight her pathological use of fantasy. At that point, she was able to access her “secret retreats” that had inhabited her mind since childhood and had created suffering, tension, and somatic excitation. As these fantasies gradually made sense to her, cues of her family trauma - originated by the Nazi persecutions - were identified. The transgenerational vicissitudes engaged the analytic couple in a transference and countertransference work. The analyst got in touch with her own dreams and childhood memories about her family history as they flew ex-Yugoslavia and moved to Trieste during the American army occupation after the war. The painstaking mourning process enabled the patient to relinquish her addictive fantasies and recognize how she had taken up an impossibile task when faced with her mother's depression. She had tried to keep her “alive” since childhood, by meeting her wishes, just as she did in the relationship with her analyst. Through the mourning process following the renunciation of her omnipotent and rescuing fantasies, the patient gained new awareness about her maternal depression. This allowed her to achieve her own psycho-physical wholeness and to own her unique life history.