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This stylishly written historiography by Luigi Zoja, a past-President of the IAAP, is based on primary research and prodigious scholarship, which ranges over antiquity, the Bible, tragic literature and politics, and beams a light, albeit blinding, on paranoia. The book evinces the considerable overlap between that condition and Jung's thinking on shadow and evil.
Paranoia, the most insidious and destructive of mental disorders, slides from sanity to delusion and is difficult to treat medically or psychologically. It is ubiquitous as, in evolutionary terms, it is advantageous for survival; in this way, it can grip anyone at any time as ‘the little Hitler inside us’ (p. 13). It feeds on secrecy, suspicion and self-justification as the enemy is always ‘out there’. Hitler's paranoia about racial contamination is recorded in Mein Kampf, where he falsely claimed that racial interbreeding led to sterility and disease. Thus blut und boden became a key Nazi slogan idealizing 19th-century Germanic racial and national romanticisim that set Hitler on a mission to annihilate diversity with unspeakable consequences. In addition, Hitler suffered from sexual phobias and had little to do with ‘the other sex’ (p. 15). His childhood was grim as was his subsequent experience of the Versailles Treaty, which marked the end of the First World War by imposing extreme retribution on the defeated countries. Likewise, the grim youth of his ‘twin’, Stalin, who, left physically and mentally disabled, was never seen to laugh or cry.
The theme of Zoja's book is prefigured by Sophocles’ play, Ajax, in which the eponymous Greek warrior succumbs to paranoid stupidity fueled by suspicion. The qualities he lacked, introspection, feminine sensibility and humour, were ones his opponent, Odysseus, possessed in abundance. Athene, the goddess of