“Zoja is one of the few authentic contemporary Italian thinkers.”
——Antonio Scurati (M. Son of the Century)

★ The author is a two-time winner of the Gradiva US Prize, with works translated into 15 languages. He served as the former President of the International Association of Analytical Psychology and currently teaches at City University of Macau, boasting authoritative professional background and international influence.
★ Amazon ranking, No. 1 in Jewish Philosophy, No. 1 in Judaism (Books)!
★ Taking the Russia-Ukraine conflict as an entry point, it delves into Europe’s geopolitics, identity crisis, and new forms of antisemitism, aligning with global hot topics and combining depth with topicality.

An essay on the urgent need to interpret the profound contradictions of Europe in the twentieth century. Whereas public debate too often merely speaks in slogans, this study asks radical questions as it moves across geopolitical conflicts, crises of identity and collective transformations.

Zoja sets out from the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the mirror of a much deeper fracture in which a liberal, fastmoving West, worn out by hyperactivity neurosis, has to confront the echo of an archaic, introspective Russia which – despite its shift towards autocracy under Putin – continues to exert a disturbing symbolic attraction. More than as an adversary, Russia appears as a symptom of our own unease.

The second feature he identifies at the core of the European identity is the cultural centrality of Hebraism in the West, in spite of – or precisely because of – a repression that is as old as it is unconscious. The Jew as a hidden archetype, as a mirror that reveals what the West no longer wishes to see in itself. At a moment in time in which antisemitism is re-emerging in new guises, Zoja offers a penetrating reflection on cultural filiation, integration and the weight of repression in the European collective unconscious.

At the end of the book the focus returns to war: not only in Ukraine but also the one that might develop on the margins of the European Union. The question it asks is not only political but also existential: are we still prepared to defend what we are? Europe has mislaid its own profound sense of identity and even as the East prepares to fight, the West takes refuge in individualism and consumption. Can a continent no longer accustomed to sacrifice, disenchanted and assimilated in the present, rediscover its identity under threat of conflict?

Luigi Zoja is a very respected Italian Jungian psychoanalyst and a very subtle and learned thinker and editorialist. He constantly travels abroad to give classes and conferences. Former President of IAAP (World Association of Jungian Analysts), Luigi Zoja has worked in Zurich, New York and Milan. With Bollati he published: Il gesto di Ettore. Preistoria, storia, attualità e scomparsa del padre, 2000, 2016 [The Father: Historical, Psychological and Cultural Perspectives], Paranoia. La follia che fa la storia, 2011, 2023 [Paranoia: The Madness that Makes History]; Sotto l’iceberg. Presenze inconsce nella società e nella storia [Below the Iceberg. Unconscious Presences in Society and History], 2023; Centauri. Alle radici della violenza maschile [Centaurs: Myth and Male Violence], 2016; Contro Ismene. Considerazioni sulla violenza, 2009 [Violence in History, Culture, and the Psyche: Essays]; Al di là delle intenzioni, 2011 [Ethics and Analysis; Philosophical Perspectives and their Application in Therapy]. He was twice awarded the Gradiva US Prize for psychological works published in English (The Father and Ethics and Analysis). He held classes and seminars in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, UK, Denmark, Holland, France, Greece, Czech Rep, Russia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Slovenia, Israel, Japan, USA, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela, Tunisia, South Africa. He presently teaches at the University of Macao in China (https://iap.cityu.edu.mo/en/list-14/42). His books and articles were translated into fifteen languages.