Psychoanalysis and the public health sector: The Greek experience

The question of whether psychoanalysis -outside the original psychoanalytical setting- can co-exist with the public sector of health services has been substantially answered by the development of relevant psychoanalytic theory and the evolution of novel psychotherapeutic techniques. Psychoanalysis has a non specific and a specific effect on the public sector. The first explores how psychoanalytic concepts formulate a special understanding of mental disorders in everyday clinical practice; both in the organisation of services and a personalised approach of particular circumstances and needs of patients. The second explores how different kinds of psychoanalytic therapies are incorporated in the public sector. The setting is as crucially important here as are the appropriate funding, the recruitment of an adequate number of specialists and psychoanalytic training. Unfortunately psychoanalysis is not considered as cost-efficient by the majority of decision makers. In Greece, psychoanalysis has been present since the late 20's, initially as an instrument of perfection of children's understanding and education and also as a specific therapeutic method, appropriate for human psyche's understanding and for the treatment of some mental diseases. In the last 30 years psychoanalysis has been more closely implicated in the development of public health services and, by extension, in the psychiatric reform taking place in the country. Psychoanalytic supervision is mainly implemented in outpatient clinical practice. Brief psychoanalytic psychotherapies are implemented in outpatient and inpatient settings.