Commentary on the Agnese Case

Agnese presented herself to the analyst talking about her feeling that ‘everything lacked authenticity’ and how she ‘felt emotionally detached and she derived a little experience of truth only from painting, an activity she had taken up recently’. On the other hand, Roberto Basile also told us how, in the first interview, several pieces of the patient's clothes were red: the anorak, the scarf, the crash helmet, in addition to the bag that was from a fashion store, with the word ‘MAD’ in big letters. In this context, she spoke about how: ‘it's a beautiful day, but everything is so frozen outside’, which suggests to the analyst the emotional atmosphere in which she felt she was living. To our Italian colleague, the red colors represent the eruption of a powerful volcano and these initial elements led him to expect that the ‘first problem to come forward’ would be the impossibility of containing volcanic emotions. Such emotions would have to be frozen and the price to be paid was to follow life always at a distance, as if behind a screen of iced glass. The analyst also relates, very briefly, this mental functioning of the patient with the failures in the containment of her objects. She herself also said that she was always surrounded by ‘intelligent’ people, but that they didn't give her much back.

Following the presentation above, made by Basile, I thought that he was describing a patient with a mental world with very inconsistent objects, which contributes to her own fragility, particularly with respect to dealing with her emotional experiences. The most important consequence of this situation is the patient's need to protect herself by keeping emotional distance from people.

These are the aspects the analyst emphasized most and that became the central point of his approach. However, Basile also presented us with other very significant data of Agnese's mental life: the countless references to strong links to concrete objects, especially for their sensory characteristic