Psychologist · Author · Paris
"I did not enter this profession because I had resolved my own difficulties. I entered it because I found that I could be genuinely present to other people's pain without needing to flee from it or fix it."
I am a psychologist, psychodynamic psychotherapist, and writer. I have been practising for more than twenty years, working in English, French, and Greek, from a consulting room in Paris that I have sat in long enough to know which chair shifts when someone is about to say something they've never said before.
I grew up in Greece. I have lived in Paris for most of my adult life. Between these two places — between the culture that formed me and the one I chose — I developed an early and sometimes uncomfortable awareness of how much of what we call the self is actually the residue of a particular language, a particular family atmosphere, a particular set of rules about what could be expressed and what had to be managed in silence. This is not a complaint. It is, I think, part of what made me suited to this work. I am familiar with the experience of being between registers — between what you feel and what you can say, between who you were raised to be and who you've gradually, imperfectly become.
I did not enter this profession because I had resolved my own difficulties. I entered it — not consciously, at first — because I found that I could be genuinely present to other people's pain without needing to flee from it or fix it, and because I was interested, with a curiosity that has not diminished, in what happens inside a person when they feel genuinely received rather than managed. I have been in my own therapy, for significant periods, across different phases of my life. I found it difficult, illuminating, and, at certain moments, genuinely transformative. I recommend it to colleagues as well as to clients without embarrassment.
I am not a neutral presence. I have views. I notice things. I sometimes find clients difficult in ways I have to examine carefully and honestly. I have made errors in sessions — said things too early, followed a thread that turned out to be mine rather than the client's, missed something important — and I have learned, with varying degrees of grace, from all of these. The claim I would make for myself is not that I practise without error but that I practise with sufficient honesty about my own humanity that errors, when they occur, can be recognised, named, and sometimes become useful material in their own right.
I write alongside the clinical work — essays, books, clinical reflections. Writing is, for me, a form of thinking: a way of making explicit what the consulting room teaches, of examining the practice from a distance sufficient to see it clearly, of developing language for what is often, in the hour itself, pre-verbal or only half-formed.
These two things — the room and the page — are not separate practices. They teach each other. The essays in the Staying With series emerged from cases and from the attempt to write about relational life with the same honesty the clinical work requires. The Relational Integrity framework, conversely, emerged from the need to name something that had been happening in the room for years before it had a name.
I write in the tradition of clinical prose that doesn't sacrifice risk for respectability — Bollas, Phillips, the later Mitchell. Writing that stays inside the encounter rather than rising above it to explain.
Long-form psychodynamic work, grounded in the Relational Integrity framework. Individual therapy and couples work. Sessions in English, French, and Greek. In person in Paris, or online.
It is not for everyone. It requires time, a willingness to sit with uncertainty, and an appetite for genuine rather than performed engagement. When it works — and it does not always work, because nothing always works — it tends to change not just what people understand about themselves but how they live inside their own experience.
That, in the end, is what I am trying to offer. Not solutions. Not relief by the session. A more honest and more inhabitable relationship to your own interior life.
If that is what you are looking for, I would be glad to talk.
A composite drawn from many different people across many years of practice. No single element represents any individual client.
You sit down in the chair and you are not sure where to start.
That is almost always how it begins. You have been thinking about this, perhaps for years — the conversation you've been having with yourself about whether you need this, whether it will help, whether you can afford it in all the senses of that word. You have probably rehearsed something on the way here. A summary. The key points. A reasonable account of why you came.
And then you're in the room, and the room has a quality you didn't expect — quieter than the street below, a particular quality of attention in it — and whatever you'd rehearsed starts to feel slightly beside the point.
What you may notice, in these early months, is a strange relief in being listened to in a particular way — not in the way of a friend, whose own life and feelings inevitably surface and redirect the conversation, but with an undivided quality of attention that feels unfamiliar. Perhaps slightly uncomfortable at first, as undivided attention often does when you haven't had it.
What is also true in this phase is that you may leave some sessions feeling worse than when you arrived. This can be alarming if you weren't expecting it. It tends to happen when something that has been carefully managed — held at a controllable distance, narrated rather than felt — gets closer to its actual weight. This is not failure. It is the work beginning.
By now, the sessions have a rhythm.
You arrive — the same building, the same stairwell, the same chair — and there is a quality of familiarity to it that carries its own complexity. This is no longer a new relationship. It has accumulated weather. There are things you've said here that you have said nowhere else.
The work has changed. It has become less about narrating your history and more about noticing what's happening now — in the session, between you and the therapist, in the quality of a given hour. You've begun to catch yourself in patterns as they occur rather than only in retrospect.
There will have been, by this point, at least one moment of rupture. Something that happened between you and the therapist — a session that felt flat or dismissive, a response that landed wrong. You may have said nothing at the time, or you may have found a way to bring it back, awkwardly, the following week, and discovered that it was possible to look at it together without the relationship collapsing.
This is not incidental to the work. It may be among the most important things the work produces.
The ending of therapy is its own form of experience, and one that most clinical literature describes in ways that don't quite capture what it actually feels like to live through it.
Knowing when to end is itself part of the work, and it is usually a conversation that develops gradually rather than a decision made on a particular day. There is no clean moment of cure, no final breakthrough that declares the work complete. There is instead a growing sense — which the therapist shares and which you arrive at together — that the conditions for which therapy was most necessary are no longer dominant.
This knowledge arrives alongside something else: grief. Even when the ending is chosen, and chosen well, it carries the weight of actual loss. To pretend otherwise would be a form of the very emotional management this work has been trying to disrupt.
In the last session, you will sit in the chair that you have sat in for however many years, and the room will have the quality that familiar rooms have when you know you're leaving them.
You take the stairs. The street noise returns. You walk back into your life. Which is, in the end, exactly what the work was for.
The first conversation is free and without obligation — a chance to see whether this way of working and your particular difficulty might be a useful fit.
Sessions are between €90 and €160. A sliding scale is available.
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