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Paolo Stramba-Badiale´s case history (Stramba-Badiale, in press) reads like a thrilling novel. His presentation evokes in me various sensations, emotions, images, associations and ideas with remarkable intensity. Central issues of forging identity—being apart and belonging, participation and exclusion, indifference and resonance, threat and security, self-experience and outer perspective—are reflected both in this psychoanalytic dyad and in the outer world in which this treatment takes place. The threatening atmosphere of the states of emergency caused by Marica’s cancer on an individual level and the pandemic on a social level functions as a magnifying glass as the contours of the therapeutic encounters between the therapist, Paolo, and his patient take shape, and the specific challenges of Marica’s process of self-finding emerge.
When we begin witnessing Paolo and Marica’s therapeutic relations and interactions, a lot has already happened. Both protagonists have already found their way of being together, for they have been working for more than a year, and Paolo has accompanied his patient through times of existential threat and agony. They seem to have reached a certain level of trust. Marica takes off her mask only when safely on the couch so that Paolo cannot see what her face, ravaged by surgery scars, looks like. He keeps thinking about her face, but this question of her face only becomes urgent when the security of their usual arrangements is disturbed and shattered by the outbreak of the pandemic.
We learn about Marica that she returned to Italy for treatment of her newly diagnosed cancer and contacted Paolo. She took this step after a lifetime of handling her affairs by herself, a strategy she had developed because of the emotional deprivation of her childhood. What we learn about her childhood and adolescence leads us to speculate that issues like belonging and identity have long been of crucial importance and might have been part of her motivation for her