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The author hopes to show that in medical intensive care and reanimation the life drive belongs first and foremost to the register of need. The helping object gives basic life-saving healthcare to the patient to bring him/her back to life. Later on, the clinician at the patient’s bedside hears his/her story. This is itself the occasion of a powerful drive reawakening, of a massive countertransference, which is like a libidinal mandate where the life drive is transfused, blurring the boundaries between self and other. In this extreme clinical situation, it is a question of asking how Eros can be fused once again with the register of need and of asking ourselves what the place of the sexual, even in an enlarged sense, is in this space, and what forms the libido can take in a period of risk of death and survival. The author examines this reterritorialization of instinctual drive activity in the plural caring function, in the moment of the psychic encounter at the patient’s bedside and in the field of the transference.