Notice: Bookings will be open on the 20th October 2027

Date: Saturday 20th November 2027 Location: Online
Start time: 4:00pm End time: 6:00pm Type: Webinar

After experiencing September 11 in New York, I started studying paranoia as a collective phenomenon. Among mental illness, only paranoia can literally make history, as it did through Hitler and Stalin. Paranoia can take hold of events directly because, unlike the rest of psychopathology, it is contagious. Its dynamics include what Jung called “Psychic Infection”: they can be self-replicating, devouring entire societies. A leader can foster paranoia, but then lose control of the phenomenon. Once infected, the collective madness acquires an autonomous life, as one can easily observe in Pogroms and Lynching. Its basic archetypal pattern consists on finding scapegoats and projecting all personal or collective shadow contents onto it. As such it tends to repeat itself in very different epochs and countries. More than a medical issue, paranoia concentrates on our relationship with Evil: and our constant need to put it at a distance, projecting it onto apt recipients.

With modern mass communication and even more so in the frivolous use of the smartphone, Paranoia relies on simplification, and can easily be multiplied at low cost, endowing aggressiveness with an amplifying self-feeding power.

The collective landscape offers unfortunately growing occasions to it. Since the 2022 “Full scale Invasion of Ukraine”, Putin has resorted to hinting that he could use “all weapons at its disposal”, referring therefore also to the nuclear ones. As a consequence, the perception of Russia has half-consciously reactivated fears of a global and annihilating conflict, experienced by the West during the Cold War.