Education and experience to date
I was born in Thessaloniki Greece, in 1972. I moved to the United Kingdom in 1996 to study psychology. I began my career in the field of Mental Health at the university of Essex, in Colchester England, where I was awarded the Bachelor of Science in Psychology (with honours). These studies had a cognitive psychology main focus. I then continued my studies at the Centre for Psychoanalysis at the same university and was awarded the Master of Arts in Psychoanalytic studies. The MA was a study of psychoanalytic theory, based on various theorists across the world, including Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, Wilfred Bion and others. I later further studied these and other theorists in my psychoanalytic training.
In 2001 I began my training as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist for adults at the Arbours Association in London, United Kingdom. During and after this training I worked for many years at the organisation’s mental health therapeutic communities, including the Arbours Crisis Centre, with a diverse group of people with acute mental health difficulties, including and not limited to major depression, anxiety, self-harm, personality disorders and eating disorders. This hands-on experience was invaluable and continues to inform my work with clients to this day.
The Arbours Association, has an important history in the field of psychiatry, anti-psychiatry and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. It is known as an organisation that offers help to individuals with serious mental health difficulties through its psychoanalytically-orientated therapeutic communities, providing a holding and containing space within a community setting, thus allowing the individual to explore and understand their difficulties as a valuable member of the community group. The purpose of this is to provide the opportunity to deal with one’s difficulties through psychotherapy and socialisation, that is, through one’s relationships with others. The Arbours’ ethos was and remains to help people to function creatively and satisfactorily in the world without the use of medication, but instead through individual and group psychotherapy to learn to function, develop and learn to deal with their pain and difficulties, having acquired through psychotherapy a repertoire of tools to help them do so. This is the way that I work with my clients.
Read more about how I work psychotherapeutically.
During my 8 years in London, I also worked in other organisations, including befriending schemes, housing for people with mental health difficulties and others, working with a variety of mental health difficulties.
Starting in 2005, I worked privately as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in North London and as an honorary psychotherapist for the UK National Health System (NHS) in the Halliwick department of Psychological Therapies at Saint Ann’s hospital.
in that it draws more on the relationship between the client and the psychotherapist and all that takes place within this relationship. As a therapist, I view myself not as a white screen on which a client will freely write their narrative, unaffected by my presence, but as an active participant in the client’s psychotherapeutic journey. This makes sense to me, as I do not think it possible to exclude the therapist’s input, conscious and unconscious, from the creation of this narrative, even if one wanted to.
I have acquired extensive experience in providing