Interview with Doctor Luigi Zoja

In his interview, Luigi Zoja recuperates part of the speech he made in the COIRAG Meeting on Violence. Zoja is particularily concerned with the subject of Evil, whose history is narrated in a psycological perspective. Evil is a fundamental problem that human beings have faced since their first origins. Zoja offers a laical interpretation, starting from the assumption that human mind is split and bivalent in its constitutive nature. What is negative, difficult to understand and accept, is projected and ascribed to the Other that consequently becomes the enemy. In some historical periods, and our present time is a good example, collective identity crises produce a radicalization of such process. This kind of exasperation produces a "paranoid culture", or more precisely a "sub-culture" that is really difficult to contain. Because the shared message is that nobody can be safe and that we are all under attack. The culture of paranoia captures and paralyzses each individual in a net of fear. It’s a pervasive form of mind control, that can arrest the life of the same mind. Being a psycoanalist, as Zoja argues, means that you must first of all understand the impossibility of defeating definitively the Evil. It’s an illusion. "You cannot build something positive if you are not conscious of the fact that Evil exists, has existed, and will always exist". And it is extremely necessary to know how, on the psychical point of view, the scission generating the Evil is working and what it wants to say. It must never be forgotten that the subject becomes a real and complete subject only in the context of the relation. Evil is the expression of human fragility and as such strengthens the split of the necessary links between intra-psychical and intra-relational parts of the mind.

Keywords: Evil, Spilt, Collettive identity crises, Paranoid culture.

Nadia Fina, Intervista al dott. Luigi Zoja in "GRUPPI" 2/2017, pp 123-127, DOI: 10.3280/GRU2017-002009