«Written with clarity and strength, Zoja’s essay is not only rich in disturbing anecdotes – something halfway between Shakespearian tragedy and an an eerie vaudeville. It is based on a strong ethical feeling which dictates its conclusion».
-- La Stampa – TuttoLibri

«It is difficult to overestimate the value of this book, its ability – so rare both among the analysts and the historians – to show in a complex and not reductionist way the relationship between paranoid folly and contemporary history».
--L’Unità

«This book is proof that an interdisciplinary eye can open perspectives of truth about complex phenomena».
--Mente & Cervello

«This book needs to be considered as a visionary instrument to look at the nature of genocide as a social massive crime derived from a socio-pathological madness».
--Enzo M. Le Fevre Cervini, Vice-Chair of the Board of Trustees, Director for Research and Cooperation – Foundation for the International Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities

★French, Spanish have been sold!
★English sample available.

Why is paranoia a drive in history? World-famous Jungian analyst Luigi Zoja gives us the answer to this question

Thanks to its enormous power of reproduction and contagion, paranoia is the only mental illness that can make history.

Luigi Zoja, former president of IAAP, the world association of Jungian analysts, has written here the first wide-ranging study of paranoia as a mass phenomenon. Paranoid logic never loses an outer look of reason, yet it is ultimately a reverse logic that projects guilt for all kinds of distress and suffering on a chosen enemy.

This «lucid folly», as old psychiatry handbooks used to define it, has an overwhelming potential of mass contagion: individual paranoids reaching wide success, persuasive and charismatic as they often are, can awake paranoia sleeping inside the common man, so that through mutual confirmation the perception of some acts as criminal decreases until it is erased altogether.

Thus this mental illness was able to shape history like no other, being the cause behind some of the greatest horrors from ancient to modern times, from the holocaust of native Americans to the Great War, from the monstrous Twentieth century totalitarianisms to the preventive wars of mature democracies in our days.

Previous books by Luigi Zoja have been translated into fourteen languages. Translation fundings can be applied for to SEPS thanks to the book’s scientific relevance.

Abstract
«Paranoia has shed too much blood to be left to psychiatrists alone. A psychiatrist can prevent someone from gripping a kitchen knife; but it won’t stop Hitler, or Stalin, or the masses that followed them. Why? Well, exactly because they followed them. Psychiatric research made us open up the gates and get out of the enclosed space where mental illness was confined. Clinical paranoia can cause great sufferings, both in the diseased subject and in the people close to him. Paranoia beyond the gates, though, hidden in everyday life and nested in the fold of society has made more victims than plague epidemics, it is more humiliating and prostrating than God’s wrath. Its executioners are absurd and stubborn».

Luigi Zoja
　　An internationally renowned Jungian analyst and former president of the International Association of Ringier Analysts (IAAP). His career has spanned cities such as Zurich, New York and Milan. Zoja's writings have been translated into fifteen languages and have been widely circulated throughout the world.

His works include:
　　The Father, which explores the evolution of the "father" figure from prehistory to modern times, was published in 2000 and 2016 and translated into several languages, including English, German, French, and Chinese.
　　Paranoia: The Madness That Made History, published in 2011 and 2023 and explores how paranoia affects the course of history, has also been translated into several languages, including English, Spanish, French, and Chinese.
　　Below the Iceberg, published in 2023, explores the existence and influence of the unconscious in society and history.
　　Centauri:myth and male violence, published in 2016, has been translated into Spanish.
　　Violence in History, Culture, and the Psyche was published in 2009
　　Beyond Intentions. Ethics and Analysis was published in 2011 and has been translated into English.

Zoja has twice won the Gradiva Prize for Psychological Work in the United States for his English-published psychological works, The Father and Beyond Intentions. Ethics and Analysis. These achievements not only demonstrate his profound achievements in the field of psychoanalysis, but also reflect the international influence and academic value of his works.