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The affect of elation corresponds to a feeling of enlargement of the ego. A felicitous example of this is joy, in response to an enrichment or triumph of the ego. But the negation of an anxiety, its reversal, can entail the impression of an extension of the ego. The joy of the mystic who inflicts privations on himself, or to a lesser degree the negation of a loss or a failure along the lines that ‘it’s really better that way’, constitute ‘the blissful reversal’ of an affective situation that should be characterised by mourning. In counterphobic behaviours, the ego is extended by decree, the danger overcome is accompanied by a feeling of elation that can have dramatic consequences in bodily or social reality when it is sought by risk-taking. The quest for elation by drug use proves to have considerable malignant potential. This malignancy culminates in delusional states of elation and manic excitation. Carried away by his frenzy, the manic individual asserts over the world a power that is as extensive as it is fallacious and his ego breaks up in its own expansion.