The author looks at the question of the psychical place of bodily pain. For Freud, the object and its loss are at the heart of the transformation of the body into the psychical sphere. On the side of affect, pain, physical and psychic, is present throughout Freud’s work and linked to the vicissitudes of anxiety. It underlies an energy of excitation that has not been transformed psychically and manifests itself in the context of a narcissism that is poorly articulated with objectalization. Two clinical vignettes follow illustrating the presence and absence of bodily pain in connection with psychical issues in which the negative is operating. When narcissistic injuries come closer to the body through physical pain, the analyst is faced with countertransference movements close to a maternal function attentive to primary care.