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In a context where reflection on the procedures for deprivation of liberty in psychiatric prescriptions and places of psychiatric care is overwhelmingly saturated by management rigidity and the more or less idealized recourse to a normative approach which one might reasonably doubt is up to the challenge, the author, a clinical psychologist, using shared and imagined examples, recalls the great richness and complexity of the clinical and social aspects of what he proposes to call situations of patient isolation. For only our capacities of imagination, as close to these situations as possible, will enable us to prevent malpractices, to avoid the impasses of a psychiatry run by the accounting department, and to form living, thoughtful relationships with our patients.