We are delighted in this News Bulletin to bring a portrait and an interview with Eva Pattis Zoja, one of our most wellknown and influential colleagues within the outreach field. Please enjoy below the portrait, written by Caterina Vezzoli, who has also made this inspiring interview.

I met Eva Pattis Zoja many years ago at CIPA in Milan; I immediately liked her beauty, introverted kindness, warm attention to others, and deep understanding of Sandplay and Analytical Psychology.
We met very often in public situations, and sometimes privately.

My admiration for her started when she developed Expressive Sandwork and used it in deprived societies and environments; she worked discretely, travelling the world where she was most needed. She went to South Africa, Latin America, China, and wherever her presence was requested. 

I deeply admired her determination to travel worldwide to teach volunteers how to use Expressive Sandwork. Her methodology is deeply Jungian in many senses, as she will explain in the interview. She maintained the simplicity of the depth combined with the theoretical and social aspects of Analytical psychology and neuroscience.

Eva’s statement: “The soul is not just hidden inside us; perhaps it is precisely between us human beings that the soul develops, and gives Analytical Psychology the opening for the mission we analysts have in the world. We might be able to create the conditions that activate the inner resources and operate towards the self-healing capacity of the psyche”.

The other amazing achievement is the method she developed to train volunteers, whom she named “facilitators”, to keep the silence in order to create a safe space where traumatized children find the resources that can increase their resilience. I’m grateful for the experience I had in Milan in 2022, where I participated in sessions of Expressive Sandwork with Ukrainian children in Milan. I witnessed how Eva’s method offered the possibility to elaborate children’s fears and traumatic experiences as they were able to enter into the sandtray very deeply and, therefore, into their selves. 

Click HERE to read Caterina Vezzoli’s portrait and interview in full.
In addition you may watch the trailer to the film A MILLION GRAINS OF SAND  by Andrea Deaglio, which has been released here in June 2024.