This article looks at the issue of “grievance” and more specifically the act of “complaining” as an anti-depressive process that makes it possible to play between pleasure and displeasure with substitutive representations of the lost object. The author examines the vicissitudes of grievance in the transference encounter and how analytic work mobilizes and then softens the defensive arsenal in the encounter with the object. Through the case of Georges, a patient seen in private practice, we will look at the repercussions of the loss of the object and its defensive solutions to show how the very act of “complaining” could be read as a masturbatory equivalent, a screen for an earlier spate of object-losses. The hallucinatory functions of the grievance and the eroticization of the anticipation of loss in the service of defensive mobilizations will be considered, as well as their reverses in the analytic work.