On the threshold of loss and its representations: masochism as a safeguard against depressive disorder.

This article explores defensive modes of masochism based through the case study of Sarah, a 25-year-old patient who is regularly followed in psychoanalytical therapy. I will postulate the idea that fetishization of moral masochism should be seen from the perspective of melancholic processes. Drawing on several moments of her therapy, I will illustrate how the primitive idealization of the introjected and denigrated object in the melancholic process lays the conditions for a decisive moral masochism, and whose unconscious idealization defends against depressive breakdown.

Transsexualism and transgenderism: Unravelling sex and gender, and abstractions of the sexed body.

Although transgenderism is accorded an increasingly important place at the heart of studies concerning problems of gender nonconformity, it remains a phenomenon that is poorly known, and difficult to define, in particular in its relationship with transsexualism. In fact, in spite of an undeniable kinship between them, these two phenomena can be distinguished one from the other, and each represents a way of relating to the subject of the difference between the sexes. To clarify this subject, this article initially presents their emergence, their commonalities and their differences from a historical point of view. Next, both ways of relating to the difference between the sexes are analysed through two clinical case studies, one of transsexualism and one of transgenderism (from extracts of non-directive clinical interviews, as well as data from the Rorschach test and the Thematic Apperception Test [TAT], analysed by the French psychoanalytic method). At the end of this investigation, it is concluded that the distinction between these two phenomena refers to two abstractions of the difference between the sexes, leading to a transformation that can be pictured as a fulfilment driven by this perception.