The author links and differentiates clinically and metapsychologically the need for punishment in melancholia and in moral masochism in relation to neurotic conflict, emphasizing the masochistic nature of guilt when it is eroticized. She examines the narcissistic dimension in both clinical fields, noting that narcissism can be an obstacle or a lever in the work of mourning. She reflects on the difficulty of cathecting the objectality of the other and the external world, and shows that narcissistic identification, making ego and object interchangeable, is the means by which the ego separates itself from the object and sets itself up against it, while at the same time preserving it. The narcissistic cathexis of the object forces the ego to mobilize regressive defences in order not to give up the lost object, which consists in “abducting” the object by incorporation. The conflict of ambivalence can then be worked out in analysis through the transference and the process of de-idealization and renunciations that it allows.