Clinical vignette illustrating a transformation in the psychic economy of a young woman whose line of conduct was governed by destructivity, driven by repetition compulsion. The analyst struggled with the work of analytic “reverie”, having few elements about her childhood or family atmosphere. It was through the emergence of an incidental thought, the association with the novel Mars by F. Zorn, that the analyst gained access to a representation of an entire part to which neither she nor her patient had access. Over the course of the work, the patient shifted from moral masochism to erogenic masochism.