Drawing on the therapeutic treatment of a young man affected by an episode of somatization that plunges him into a quasi-melancholic state, the author explores the ways in which the need for punishment, linked to his unconscious sense of guilt, finds satisfaction. The course of the psychotherapy reveals the difficulty of forming a superego in a configuration where Oedipal structuring could not be put in place due to the preponderance of traumatic breaches in the patient's childhood, in a family in which incestuality played an important role. A moment in the transference opens the way to a fruitful elaboration and the possibility of a new mode of functioning. The functions of somatization and projection, particularly operative in the patient, echo the hypotheses put forward by Claude Smadja and Jean-Louis Baldacci concerning the link between the need for punishment and somatization.