PSYCHOANALYSIS – Rome, conference canceled due to Israeli presence
Luigi Zoja: a missed opportunity

An international conference, titled “Personal and collective trauma, sharing of points of view and professional experiences,” was to be held in Rome on June 9. It was to be a discussion between Italian, Israeli and British experts about the traumas of October 7 and therapies to help adults and children overcome them. There were no political issues on the table, yet the conference, due to the presence of Israeli professionals, was canceled. This was announced in recent days by the New Israeli Jungian Association, the promoter of the initiative that had obtained the sponsorship of the Italian Association for Analytical Psychology – AIPA and the Italian Association for Research on Analytical Psychology – ARPA.
It was internal criticism from AIPA members that blew it, and so any opportunity for discussion was canceled. “My colleagues have their own reasons, but it is a missed opportunity,” maintained the psychoanalyst and sociologist Luigi Zoja, president of the international association of Jungian analysts and one of the speakers of the missed conference. “Analysts should represent a sort of élite of the consciousness, intended as awareness. Instead, in this case, for fear of conflicts, there was an abdication from this role,” Zoja, a psychoanalyst and sociologist, explained to Pagine Ebraiche.
For June 9, Zoja had prepared a talk on the “Perception of Jewish identity in a non-Jewish person”, a reflection related to the current atmosphere and the wave of antisemitism that has also spread in Italy since October 7, referring particularly to paranoia. “The paranoid focuses all his mind on looking for responsibility and then projects it outwards. Responsibilities exist, but they are never personal, the cause is always somebody else. There is always a scapegoat,” stressed Zoja.
“This pathology is not peculiar only to individuals, but also to the masses. It is a phenomenon we find throughout centuries of human history, from tribal societies to Nazism. When there are strong tensions and no processing capacity, our psyche’s simplifying motion leads to dumping everything on the outside, on the other. And it is a contagious phenomenon.” The victim elected to bear the burden of these collective tensions, explained the author of the book Paranoia – The madness that makes history (Bollati Boringhieri), is very often Judaism. And the ongoing dynamics between Israel and Gaza have forcefully resurfaced this mechanism. “This is beyond political opinions on the current Israeli government, which I personally consider terrible. The current dispute in the Middle East sheds light on infinitely older phenomena.”

Translated by Marta Gustinucci, student at the Secondary School of Modern Languages for Interpreters and Translators of the University of Trieste, trainee at the newspaper office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities – Pagine Ebraiche.