Studying the archives of the Hellenic Society of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: An outline of its historical course

Abstract

The authors attempt to outline the historical course of the Hellenic Society of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (HSPP). They put forward several hypotheses concerning the dynamics of its foundation and evolution. The HSPP was founded in 1977 by five Greek psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists trained abroad, after three decades of fruitless attempts at establishing psychoanalysis in Greece. The authors sustain that the foundation of the HSPP addressed the complex problems of Greek society in the 1970s. The request for the founding of an institution for psychoanalytic therapy and training can be linked to a search for new orientations in thought that would enhance the working-through of traumas that had marked Greek society in the previous decades; these traumas played a role in the insurmountable problems in establishing psychoanalysis in Greece and in the difficulties met by the emancipation of Greek psychiatry from asylum-centered practice. The HSPP remained the only psychoanalytic institution in Greece until the foundation of the Hellenic Psychoanalytic Society in 1984. One of the main traits of its historical course has been the effort to shape a psychoanalytic organization directed towards the clinical reality of Greek society.

Key words:

• resistance to psychoanalysis
• psychoanalysis in Greece
• collective trauma
• mourning

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Konstantinos Talfanidis

Konstantinos Talfanidis, MD, is a child and adolescent psychiatrist and a full member of the Hellenic Society of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (HSPP); he is also a member of the Executive, the Archives and the Library Committee of the HSPP. He works in private practice and in the public sector, and is a supervisor in the psychoanalytic psychotherapy department of the Athens University department of psychiatry. He has also published on the psychoanalytic therapy of children and adolescents.

Grigoris Maniadakis

Grigoris Maniadakis, MD, is an associate member of the Hellenic Society of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and a member of its Archives Committee. He works in private practice and in the public sector, as coordinator of the education department of the Hellenic Centre for Mental Health and Research, and as a supervisor at the personality disorder department of the Athens University department of psychiatry. He has co-edited Marie Bonaparte: A person of history and psychoanalysis (with G. Vaslamatzis and D. Rigas) and the Greek edition of the Dictionary of Kleinian thought (with G. Chalkia). He has also published on the psychoanalytic treatment of borderline and narcissistic patients, and on psychoanalytic approaches to art. In addition, he is film section editor of the journal Oedipus and an associate editor of this journal.