When pain invades the body, it mobilizes a narcissistic counter-cathexis and serves to delimit the boundaries of the ego when fixation to a primary relationship has made differentiation difficult. It is indeed the body, the locus of maternal domination, that will be the seat of the need for punishment. For the artist M. Abramovic, the orgasmic experience of enduring pain during violent performances makes her feel she has the right to live. For Louis, in the fragment of the analysis presented, the onset of chronic pain followed a negative therapeutic reaction and enabled him to emerge from a melancholic state and rework his relationship with his imagos, which had been constructed in a persecutory mode. Pain acts as a framing structure that permits the negative hallucination of the mother. The Oedipal father of a child who is being beaten is implicitly present in the scene, in the concrete presence of the anonymous spectator or as a phantasized address, both feared and hated.