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This article studies the dialectical links between psychic determinism and freedom that are at the heart of psychoanalytic theory. Through the study of a clinical case, the author shows how the unconscious determinants that imprison the subject in the chains of neurosis are the same psychic elements that constitute the bedrock of the individual’s subjectivity, desire and forms of enjoyment. Consideration of the transitional capacities of the psyche will help us to understand how the process of retrospective working-through promoted by analysis can lead the subject to create new subjective modifications and other compromise formations, thereby gaining access to another degree of freedom.