Psychoanalytikerinnen. Biografisches Lexikon

Women Psychoanalysts in Greece

Geschichte

Athina Alexandris
Stavroula Beratis
Marie Bonaparte (France)
Frosso Karapanou
Anna Potamianou

Athina Alexandris

The Greek paediatrician, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Athina (Athéna) Alexandris received her psychiatric and psychoanalytic training in Montreal in Canada. In the 1960s, she worked as a child psychiatrist at the Institute Albert-Prévost in Montreal. After the fall of the Greek junta in 1974, she settled in Athens, where she was involved in an attempt to establish a psychoanalytic study group in Greece. When this effort failed in 1975, she and her colleague Panagiotis Sakellaropoulos founded the Greek Society for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy two years later.
Finally, in 1981, a psychoanalytic study group was founded by Athina Alexandris, Peter Hartocollis, Panagiotis Sakellaropoulos, Anna Potamianou and Stavroula Beratis. The Hellenic Psychoanalytic Study Group gained formal recognition by the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) in 1982 and became an IPA member society in 2001. In 1987, however, it came to a split. The reason was that Alexandris and Sakellaropoulos claimed to be considered as training analysts without fulfilling the requirements oft the IPA standards. Athina Alexandris resigned from the Study Group and concentrated on the training of therapists in the Society of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy.
Most of Athina Alexandris' writings deal with fundamental topics such as guilt, the unconscious, supervision, violence, and the role of presence in psychoanalysis and in life. In her recently published book on the death instinct and its various disguises (2015), she based her discussion on Melanie Klein's concept. (Top of the article)



Stavroula Beratis

Stavroula (Avra) Beratis graduated as a doctor from the Medical School at Athens University and did her residency in psychiatry in New York. Subsequently, she worked as an assistant professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. She underwent psychoanalytic training at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and became a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
In 1981 Stavroula Beratis founded in Athens - along with Anna Potamianou, Peter Hartocollis, Athéna Alexandris and Panagiotis Sakellaropoulos - the Hellenic Psychoanalytic Study Group, later the Ελληνικη Ψυχαναλυτικη Εταιρεια (ΕΨΕ) [Hellenic Psychoanalytical Society], recognised as a component society by the International Psychoanalytical Association in 2001.
Stavroula Beratis is a training and supervising analyst and a former president of the Hellenic Psychoanalytical Society ΕΨΕ. She is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis at the Medical School of the University of Patras. Her publications deal with subjects such as mental problems of thalassaemic children, suicidal attempts and suicides in Greek adolescents, depressive reactions, and the prodromal phase of schizophrenia. (Top of the article)



Frosso Karapanou (1909-2002)

Frosso Karapanou (or Carapanou / Carapanos) was born in Alexandria, the daughter of Gerasimos Karapanos and Hermine Mavrommatis. Her father was a mining engineer. From 1943 to 1947 she undertook a personal analysis with Andreas Embirikos, the Greek poet and pioneer of psychoanalysis. She then moved to Paris in order to train as a psychoanalyst and commenced a second analysis with René Laforgue. Simultaneously, she studied psychology at the Sorbonne (1947-1949) and attended the child analytic seminars conducted by Françoise Dolto. In 1950 she went to Geneva, where she obtained her diploma as a kindergarten teacher. She returned to Athens for family reasons. From 1955 to 1958 she established the first psychoanalytically oriented kindergarten in Greece.
Between 1951 and 1968, Frosso Karapanou regularly travelled to Paris for further psychoanalytic training, attending the courses of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP). Since the early 1960s, she was also working at the Centre of Mental Health and Research (CMHR) in Athens directed by Anna Potamianou, where she headed a specialised unit of psychoanalytic psychotherapy established in 1965. After the coup d'état by the military junta in 1967, Frosso Karapanou stayed in Paris. Supervised by Georges Devereux, she graduated as a PhD with an ethno psychiatric study on obesity (1975). In 1968 she applied to the Institute of the SPP to be accepted as a candidate and thus finish her training. The SPP, however, insisted upon a new analysis, which she underwent with Denise Braunschweig in the years of 1969 to 1973. Family reasons forced her to return to Athens in 1973. Ten years later, in 1983, she became a member of the Hellenic Psychoanalytic Study Group, founded in 1982 and recognised the same year by the International Psychoanalytical Association. (Top of the article)



Anna Potamianou née Pipineli (1926-2021)

Anna Pipineli-Potamianou was born in Piräus and studied philosophy and archeology at the Philosophical School of Athens. In 1958 she graduated with a PhD thesis on the causes of anti-social behaviour. Subsequenly she studied psychology at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she worked at L'Hôpital des Enfants Malades, alongside with the French psychoanalysts Serge Lebovici and René Diatkine. She was trained as a child psychotherapist at the Centre de Formation et de Perfectionnement de Psychothérapeutes.
Impressed by the psychiatric reformation movement in France, Anna Potamianou founded in 1956 the Centre of Mental Health and Research (CMHR) in Athens - the first official effort to implement psychiatric reformation in Greece. From 1957 to 1967, she was Scientific Director at the CMHR. After the coup d'état by the military junta in 1967, the CMHR was placed under state supervision and Anna Potamianou resigned. She went back to Paris to train as a psychoanalyst at the Institute of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP). In 1974 she became a member, and in 1980 a training analyst of the SPP.
When the junta fell in 1974, she returned to Greece once again as the scientific director of the CMHR, a post she held until 1978. In 1981 Anna Potamianou, Peter Hartocollis, Athéna Alexandris, Panagiotis Sakellaropoulos and Stavroula Beratis founded the Hellenic Psychoanalytic Study Group, which gained formal recognition by the IPA in 1982. In 2001 the Ελληνικη Ψυχαναλυτικη Εταιρεια (Hellenic Psychoanalytical Society) became an IPA member society. Anna Potamianou served as its president from 1998 to 2002 and belonged to the IPA board from 2005 to 2009. Besides working as a psychoanalyst in private practice, she taught at the Pantion University in Athens.
Anna Potamianou is also a member of the Paris Psychosomatic Institute (IPSO) and the Association Internationale de Psychosomatique Pierre Marty (AIPPM), and she has published widely on psychosomatic issues. In her study Destins et carillons de la culpabilité (2013) she examined the question of the relationship between guilt and somatisations. Perhaps best-known is her book Hope. A Shield in the Economy of Borderline States. Based on clinical cases, literary examples and myths, Potamianou shows in this book how borderline patients use hope as a means of denying reality, preventing change and sustaining omnipotence. (Top of the article)



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