Fragments of the analytic voyage of a forty year old patient, haunted by the idea of her death since infancy when confronted with the anguish that accompanies the discovery of a potentially death dealing illness. In three years of intensive analytic work, her way of functioning psychically changed dramatically (her flight from imaginative life, total disaffectation of her emotional life, psychic deafness regarding her body and its messages …). These discoveries led to my analysand's resuming her psychoanalytic voyage in these words: ‘Even if I am destined to die of this cancer, at least I shall have lived’.