Fathoming the Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in Greece

Broadcast 1 December, 2023. Duration: 1 hour 30 minutes

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The Freud Museum welcomed the Hellenic Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy for this panel discussion on the beginnings of psychoanalysis in Greece.

The panel – comprised of psychoanalysts and historians – will trace the difficulties that were met in the establishment of psychoanalysis in Greece, and the conditions that eventually made it possible. In the post-war decades, the aftermath of a series of collective historical traumas created an ambiance of hostility towards not only psychoanalysis but even the notion of psychic pain. The request for the founding of institutions that would provide psychoanalytic therapy and training emerged in the seventies, some years after the fall of a military dictatorship. It can be linked to a search for new orientations in thought that would enhance the working through of the traumas that had marked Greek society; numerous psychoanalysts who had trained abroad and returned were ready to respond to this. So, the soil for psychoanalytic institutions was now fertile. This period also saw the reform of psychiatry from an asylum-centered to a community-oriented model and the emergence of child psychiatry coinciding with the establishing of psychoanalysis in Greece.

The panel will discuss the formation of psychoanalysis in relation with the broader historical context in Greece’s recent history.

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Speakers:

Grigoris Maniadakis, MD, is a training and supervising analyst and the current President of the Hellenic Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (IFPS). He has published several papers on the psychoanalytic therapy of non-neurotic states, the psychoanalytic approach to art and literature and the history of psychoanalysis in Greece. He has coedited Marie Bonaparte, an historical and psychoanalytic figure (with G. Vaslamatzis and D. Rigas) and the Greek edition of R. Hinshelwood’s Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (with G. Chalkia). From 2014 to 2022 he served as coeditor-in-chief of the International Forum of Psychoanalysis. He is also the author of two books of poetry.

Konstantinos Talfanidis, MD, is a child and adolescent psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst and training analyst of the Hellenic Society of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (HSPP); he is also a member of the Training Committee of the HSPP. He works in private practice. He has published on the introduction and history of Psychoanalysis in Greece.

Danae Karydaki is a modern historian interested in the social history of the psy-sciences (psychoanalysis, psychology, psychiatry), gender history, insitutional history, and the historiography of mass violence in the post-war period. She is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Research Centre for the Humanities, Athens, Greece and has been employed in research or teaching positions at the University of Thessaly, the University of Athens, and Birkbeck, University of London. She has published several peer-reviewed articles in academic journals and edited volumes, had edited in Greek the volume Leros in the Spotlight and on the Margin: History, Politics, Psychiatry (Psifides: 2020), and her monograph History and Psychoanalysis in the Columbus Centre: The Meaning of Evil is forthcoming from Routledge (2023). She is book review editor of Almagest and a founding member of the Greek Association of Historians.