1st edition: October 2021

The authors of the volume: Ioannis Vartzopoulos, Chrysi Giannoulaki, Orestis Giotakos, Vasiliki Giotsidi, Vasilis Dimopoulos, Petros Kefalas, Iacovos Kleopas, Konstantinos Kokkolis, Maria Kountza, Ioanna Kousteni, Venetsanos Mavreas, Marina Skourteri, Nikos Stefanis, Stelios Stylianidis, Georgios Tzefarakos, Stelios Farsaliotis.

In today's age of dehumanization, digital life, and the shrinking of social bonds, the identity of psychiatry is characterized by significant epistemological fluidity and fragility. This fragility does not concern the ontological existence of psychiatric disorders, but essentially pertains to the simplifying therapeutic responses to the bio-psycho-social complexity of the suffering individual, which are dominated by the reductionism of the biomedical model.

The practice of psychiatry conducted strictly through evidence-based knowledge and therapeutic protocols often completely disassociates the clinical psychiatrist and clinical psychologist from the experience of the Other, from the phenomenological substance of the therapeutic encounter itself. The exclusive focus on diagnosis through the use of criteria, which characterizes modern inflationary diagnostic systems, results in a lack of interest in the subjective experience of patients through understanding, an essential element in therapeutic and rehabilitative efforts, risking a psychiatry without a soul.

This handbook aims to bring back to the forefront of psychiatric therapeutic practice, through the psychoanalytic-psychodynamic approach, the experience and understanding of psychopathology, the encounter with the suffering subject in all its dimensions, in a constant transaction with the context of treatment and care.

The openness of this work to a contemporary interdisciplinary dialogue allows for a better scientific framing of these intuitive transactions, which in psychoanalysis relate to the two fundamental concepts of transference and countertransference, and appear in phenomenology as the understanding act by which the transfer of one Ego to the realm of the Other is sought.

A modern, human-centered Social Psychiatry also requires a subjective clinical theory. Contemporary psychoanalysis is characterized by a great theoretical pluralism and a polyphony of theoretical and clinical approaches. However, we must accept in our searches the very spirit of a saying by Dante, which states that "there is the same pleasure in knowledge and in doubt about that knowledge, in its questioning."