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The author suggests that lovesickness incorporates a particular mnemic trace or « humiliation » imprinted on the psyche –soma, a residue of the fantasy generated by the primal scene. The lover’s ecstasy or subjugation thus relates to an object that evokes both the original injury to self-esteem and the possibility of its healing. Before this former deadlock sets in, these patients are confronted with a stage of non-mediatised thing-representation. This explains the unusual temporality of the lover’s giddiness, which results from the failure of the perceptual apparatus to escape adequately from a massive stimulatory influx. Does the tormenting effect of any trauma not ensue from the fact that the ego is not only delivered to the onslaughts of disturbing cognitive « representations » but also attacked from inside by their drive-producing residues that continue to « activate » the infantile state of internal emergency? It is this memory that goes to constitute the drive.