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Francis Bacon painted numerous self-portraits and portraits of men with distorted faces screaming. This scream may be understood as a scream of pain and hateful rage, a silent scream linked to the dyspnea of the asthmatic painter. The scream as the first distress call does not seem to have been heard by his mother and the visitor, faced with the silent canvases of writhing faces, experiences the pain of absence. Bacon tries to deal with pain, rage and asthma while paradoxically seeking them. This process is located at the level of the perverse masochism of his sadomasochistic relations, at the level of a representation of the pain fixed on the paternal object and that of a resumption of primary erotogenic masochism transforming the pain into unpleasure through the process of eroticization which makes it possible to endure primary distress. The repetition of the painter’s gesture thwarts the excitation caused by the dyspnea and the traces of an ego overwhelmed by painful affects in a movement of survival.