This paper aims at showing that if phobia eschews the traditional pattern of transference neuroses, it however finds its elaboration framework within the dimension of narcissism and its vicissitudes. Phobia is a symptôm meaning to insist on the overflow of the ego unable to handle an impulse ebb and flow and notably in the fact that, then, the ego does not have at hand sufficient elements that would enable it to translate into a net of representations the internal feeling of impotence or annihilation. The phobia emerges where the ego collapses or least threatens to collapse. It is within this narcissistic weakness, moreover in the gap, that the phobogenous object is swallowed up in order to try and bestow a meaning onto the subject’s feeling. That object which will be held a phobic object only when it can receive a name, is also meant to give a meaning to the counter-phobic object thus compensating the failing narcissistic function of the internal object. The counter-phobic objet is an “already-there” object wherefrom the phobic elaboration will be erected within its multifarious facets.

Adolescence, 2026, 44, 2, 361-378.