ABSTRACT
A patient returned to see her analyst after several years of analysis simply to reflect on what she was living through: she had a cancer recurrence. She trivialised her illness, but was very angry; she felt lonely even though she had a companion and her daughter, who was still young. Through the evocation of her daily life, burdened by illness, one could hear her extreme difficulty in taking stock of what might well be the end of her life. How can she continue to inhabit her life, the analyst asked herself as she was accompanying her, as an articulation between culture and death. If culture, with respect to civilization, is difficult to define in its individual and collective sense, the work of culture, of which S. Freud posited certain premises, refers to a polysemic concept, interpreted differently by certain authors from their reading of Freudian contributions on this topic.
