The scope session is not enabled.

I struggled with an application.cfc that was not giving me a session scope. I was wrongly putting

<cfset this.name = "appname">
<cfset this.sessionmanagement = "yes">

inside of the function onApplicationStart.

Those settings have to be inside of just the component tag as

<cfcomponent disp...

  <cfset this.nam...

    <cffunction name="onApplicationStart" ...

Once I changed it, everything went better than expected.