`titrebSummary`/titrebBased on three clinical vignettes illustrating analytic work with elderly patients, including one suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, the author considers the object of lack in the psychoanalyst’s countertransference, referring in turn to the difficulty of accepting dissatisfaction connected with dependence, the impossibility of mourning without any recovery in the libidinal economy and the incapacity to imagine the forthcoming loss of the object. Drawing on the objectalising function described by A. Green, he demonstrates the benefit of analytic work with these patients and concludes that to understand the patient’s relationship with the illness, it is necessary first to consider his relationship to the object, in particular the cathexis received from this latter.