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Identity recovery, understood as the ability to singularly redefine oneself, beyond a mentally ill identity, is considered the essence of experiential recovery. But to define oneself in a singular and creative way involves the subject undergoing the test of freedom, always paradoxically considered desirable as well as burdensome. Based on the writings of Irvin Yalom, the author sheds existential light on the anxieties generated by freedom, before asking to what extent certain subjects could set up numerous and/or rigid defense mechanisms to protect themselves from it, thereby compromising their capacity for self-recovery. By means of an analysis of the definition of self coupled with an existential phenomenological analysis of the relationship to freedom, carried out with two patients who have experienced serious and persistent psychological suffering, the author questions the psychological mechanisms that can reinforce, or on the contrary allay, the anxiety of freedom and, in doing so, prove to be useful for recovery-oriented clinical work.