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Bipolar troubles question the images of melancholy and of mania, whose psychoanalytic models of reference are briefly recalled. The state of infantile distress, at the origins of psychic life, lead the author to question the status of the object, between presence and absence. Winnicott’s conceptualisations naturally invite us to reflect, over and beyond the dualistic opposition, to an intermediary space of experience, whose creative function implicitely determines the place of the object. Whereas at a primitive level, the object can only be apprehended by the experience of its absence, the capacity to lose it is determined by the quality of the first cathexes, between presence and absence. The projective tests, with their double perceptive and projective sollicitation can set to work the quality of object cathexes as well as the capacity to tolerate their loss when they become unavailable. Bipolar adolescents may present a singular perceptive cathexis to projective tests which reveals their necessary attachment to “seeing”, a counter-cathexis to the anxiety of losing sight of the object and awakening a profound distress.