This article looks upon the problems of the cancer diagnostic effects on people undergoing early detection techniques for this disease. A specificity of the psychoanalytic clinical work comes out, to which the author adds a reflection in accordance to Freud’s discourse after the 1920s. Through some notions such as traumatism, masoquism and repetition, the concepts of trauma and cleavage, as proposed by Ferenczi in his late writings, are also brought into the heart of her clinical experience.
These concepts support the author’s reflection upon the transferential and counter-transferential complexity of any psychoanalytic work on cancer patients.