Flaming Red: A Session with Agnese

Agnese is a young woman around the age of 35; she is pretty, self-confident and trendy. She has a degree in law, works for a big multinational corporation and has spent long periods abroad to study and work.

I remember that at our first meeting she arrived wearing a red anorak, a red scarf and a red crash helmet, and she was carrying a red handbag. She also had a bag from a fashion shop which had the label ‘MAD’ in big letters. At the door, soon after introducing herself, she said, ‘Today it's a beautiful day, but everything is so frozen outside!’ as if she wanted to underline the freezing emotional atmosphere in which she felt she was living. This whole profusion of red colour did not convey to me a sense of seduction but rather the feeling of the mighty eruption of a volcano.

When presenting her problems, she initially concentrated on physical symptoms. In particular, she was suffering from a sense of chest oppression and difficult breathing. Just a few minutes later, she moved on to speaking of her feeling that everything lacked authenticity. She felt emotionally detached and she derived a little experience of truth only from painting, an activity she had taken up recently. She said it was not her first therapy. She had been under treatment for some time before, but then she had suddenly interrupted it. She had been with an ‘analyst’ who was intelligent, but brusque (‘he felt like my father’, she confessed). The analyst did not speak much. He was extremely irritable and got angry when he saw that she did not show proof of changing quickly enough, for example, in breaking up with her boyfriend who, according to the therapist, was unsuitable for her. During a particularly stormy session, the therapist—irritated by her existential inactivity—had literally told her to ‘fuck off’. At that point, she had left him forever. She said she had always been surrounded by ‘intelligent’ people, but in the end these intelligent people were not giving much to her.

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