Affect is a central concept in psychoanalysis, where it takes on the value of a representative of the drive. The question of whether affect conveys truth or is a lure opens up a clinical perspective. The author seeks to follow its possible vicissitudes, between excess presence and disappearance, when a combination of borderline functioning and a psychosomatic manifestation are found in one and the same patient. This dialectic is illuminated metapsychologically in one of André Green's last texts, which postulates an early break in the link between the drive and the future object, weakening narcissism.