Studio privato

How can the same person, living in the same city – Milan – at the very same time, be regarded both as a “madwoman” to be kept under control with hefty doses of psychiatric medication (prescribed after a ten-minute consultation) and as a brilliant professional, hired to provide vaguely defined “therapeutic support”, paid under the table, to clients who are as wealthy as they are desperate, lost in a maze of naturopaths, self-proclaimed practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine, beauty clinics and wellness retreats? The contradiction does not lie solely with the woman who lives through and recounts these experiences. Rather, it is emblematic of a time and a place that encourage us to care about mental health only insofar as it enables us to remain endlessly productive, capable of working and generating income under any circumstances. On the one hand, Violetta falls easy prey to doctors rushing from one private practice to the next; on the other, she finds herself recruited as a “psychologist” by a dubious group of self-styled “healers” interested in nothing more than exploiting society’s most vulnerable. Bellocchio delivers a sharp, incisive novel that is also a wildly funny tragicomedy about a metropolis in constant transformation.

«I would go home, take a long series of hot showers, sleep for fifteen hours, and pretend none of this had ever happened. Maybe not tomorrow, but eventually it would stop hurting. In time, the burning would fade. That was my rule about pain: eventually, it would stop hurting».