Si no fóssim tan educats...

According to Freud the main task of the mental apparatus is to master and bind the instinctual excitation. Who has not felt the impulse alluded to in the title when faced with the libidinality of others? What is feared, what is desired, depends to a great extent on the situation and the affect with which this impulse imposes itself on the subject. Is the experience of despair and a barely controllable rage the triggering moment or is it a pleasurable impulse that anticipates the eruption of sexual or destructive drive quantities? In the context of the psychoanalysis of a nine-year-old foster child, the author confronts excitement in two ways: on the one hand, as a task the boy needs to deal with, and on the other in the form of a countertransference triggered by the boy’s excitement, which brings the analyst into contact with rejected drive impulses of his own infantile sexuality. The clinical vignette shows how quickly large quantities of excitement can cloud the vision of the love-transference, but it also shows how working through the countertransference can contribute to binding the excitement.