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As a specific manifestation of moral masochism, the need for punishment came into conflict from the outset (1924) with the prerogatives of the punitive superego (1923), making the clear-cut distinction between masochism and moral conscience uncertain. After outlining the open dialectics of this conflict, the author briefly considers the two most important attempts to overcome the relative aporias in Freud's work, as seen in Benno Rosenberg's notion of “masochism as a guardian of life” and Jean-Luc Donnet's notion of “the superego as a guardian of psychic meaning”. The former attempts to salvage the internal coherence of the need for punishment by advocating the priority of masochism, while the latter displaces the conflict in question within the superego itself, by integrating masochism under the feminine component of a bisexual superego. A short clinical vignette helps to formulate some questions about the consequences of these aporias for the interpretation of the need for punishment in analysis.