Punir, être puni, se punir Du besoin de punition à l'autopunition

Referring to borderline situations, such as those encountered when negative therapeutic reactions, passionate transferences or paradoxical defences emerge in analysis, the author looks at the difference between the need for punishment and self-punishment. She suggests that in these situations of resistance through the transference, the need for punishment manifests itself through an acted masochism that conceals, through reversal, a sadistic passivation of the analyst. The analyst offers him or herself as a binding acted sado-masochistic solution equivalent to being punished and punishing, a situation that attests to the patient's deficiencies of primary symbolization and the failure to find a neurotic solution to unconscious guilt. As a figurative form of this guilt, it should be understood as a defence against the risk of losing the object, the issue being one of identity more than Oedipal. In analysis, the transformation of this acted transference into infantile sado-masochistic phantasy representations would be a sign of more neurotic manifestations, of the transition from the need for punishment to self-punishment.