This text, which we note in advance contains spoilers, seeks to analyze the film Paterson (2016) through several themes linked to psychoanalysis and Chinese philosophy, including the notion of fort da and the void. We will focus on what we consider a turning point in the film: Paterson’s loss of the notebook containing his poems. It is therefore relevant to examine that event through Freud’s concept of the Fort Da game, later discussed by the essayist Didi Huberman, as well as Françoise Cheng’s idea of the void in Chinese philosophy and art. We will also draw on the concept of Thirdness, developed by Peirce and later taken up by Freud, and on the dissolution of the Oedipus Complex, which we consider important for understanding this moment in the film. From that point on, Paterson becomes aware of what he had: his notebook of poems. The loss of that object, which seems to have stirred something in him, generates an absence that can give rise to a certain alterity, to thirdness, to the emergence of something else, something new, unexpected and contingent, outside his routine world. In this sense, the absence of the notebook functions as a regulator of Paterson’s behavior.