At this table called "Systemic Process" I have the misfortune or fortune to be the last speaker. This means that I have to manage to communicate, despite all your justifiable fatigue.

Communication does not mean only the exchange of information and knowledge, but the sharing of experiences and feelings. So I will start with my feelings about this meeting, which range in a very wide range. Joy, very great joy, since I am given the opportunity to meet my good friends from Thessaloniki, to anxiety, huge anxiety as I see many new faces and hear many different languages. How will we communicate? does the verbal message I send from here reach you? How does it sound? what is not heard? And given the impossibility of feed back, determined by the context of the amphitheater and the defining distance between speakers and listeners, the possibility for communication is hindered.

I also feel a huge responsibility, because I will refer to the tool we have in our hands, "Systemic Consideration" and its use to the clients who trust us.

But my dominant feeling is hope. The meeting of two people or a group of people, regardless of the difficulties of the meeting, is always an opportunity, a hope for a birth.

So Systemic Process, title of section, and I have the obligation to vary what I have prepared, so as not to repeat elements that have been mentioned, but to take them further.
Here in Thessaloniki, a month ago, our worthy director, Thodoros Angelopoulos, started shooting his new film. He had prepared in his own methodical way, everything: The actors, the extras, the crew, the shots. But something happened that ruined his plans. The weather is bad! To be precise, while Angelopoulos had planned for there to be fog and gloom, the weather broke and it was sunny!

Therefore, Angelopoulos postponed the shoot. Reality had to fit his plans for his own reality, as he wanted to capture it in his film. Angelopoulos's work will ultimately be full of blur, which will be true, but will represent only one part of the truth, since Angelopoulos's cinematography only writes when there is blur. So I also have to be careful, so that in my comments I do not record only haziness or only sunshine, because reality includes both entities.

Today we are faced with a situation in Psychiatry where the organic conception considers that according to the new evidence it is entitled to claim, that things are only biological, only organic.

There is a flurry of news today about the discovery of new genes. As they claim, they predetermine the development of cancer, psychosis, substance use, and even whether you will become a Psychologist, Psychiatrist or Social Worker. There is excitement leading up to the assumption that one day we will be able to take a person's genetic map when they are born and predict their entire life course. But while this seems revolutionary and new, it is a remake of an old work. is the story of Mendel.

The organic view certainly contains truths, which some one-dimensional psychological theories find it difficult to contain. We clearly have our personal genetic map, which potentially determines a multitude of issues.

However, the evolution and formation of man will ultimately depend decisively on other intrapsychic and social components. Failure to assess and evaluate them will constitute a tragic scientific error that does not affect reality, which exists anyway, but our knowledge of reality. Therefore, at this moment, it is imperative, more than ever, to utilize the Systemic Consideration that refers to bio-psycho-social issues and problems and to bio-psycho-social components, overcoming false dilemmas and offering new dimensions to the consideration of human relationships.

I am a Child Psychiatrist and I am happy about this every day, since there is a beauty in Child Psychiatry. In the morning a delegate wondered if Systemic Considerations were some deep thoughts.

For anyone who works in the daily clinical practice of Child Psychiatry, for anyone who works with families, the Systemic Consideration is not some thoughts, it is an observation of the reality that develops in front of him. The therapist participates in the interactions and this is very different from merely thinking about them.

The therapist during a therapeutic session with the dysfunctional family can be expected to feel pressure, tension, suffocation, anxiety and fear. He participates in a process that is not merely related to what he can assume, but experiences a certainty. Entanglements and problems unfold in front of him that are finally overcome, as the creation of functional solutions is catalyzed by utilizing the resources of the family itself.

Years ago in recommendations for Systemic Family Therapy we had to refer thoroughly to the fact that children's symptoms expressed family dysfunctions. That's the way things are, there can be no doubt. In any case, the character and personality of the child cannot but be influenced by the dynamics of intra-family relationships.

A scientific populism led things so that, out of all the richness of Freud's scientific thought, it remains for many that the lack of sex is to blame for all psychiatric disorders. Therefore his offer would also bring about a magical solution.

Correspondingly, another populism is going to prevail within the framework of the Systemic view, that supposedly, for all the children's problems only the parents are to blame. In other words, the truth that the relationship and attitude of the parents contributes decisively to the normal development of children is distorted into the fact that everything is the parents' fault.
Therapists who tend to blame parents should ask themselves if something of their own personal history is being touched upon. This is a very basic issue that they must pay attention to because by putting parents on the wall, they lose the possibility of utilizing their valuable potential.

As known, there are no personality disorders in childhood. Children are not adults in miniature, but personalities in progress. This is where the therapeutic work of Child Psychiatrists is founded.

One cannot be a Child Psychiatrist and work with children without assessing and addressing the quality of the parents' relationship. We have to investigate the "partnership" issue in depth. Couples today have not been sufficiently prepared and endowed to be able to function as parents and as a couple even after marriage. At this point I want to be very clear. If we are talking about substantial intervention in the child's mental health issues, prevention cannot begin with the child's birth.

Prevention is related to the conditions for the creation of the love relationship. In the initial approach to establishing a partnership, the future dynamic already exists. We should focus on the terms that exist in the initial contract of coexistence between the two people who decide to live as a couple. The areas of future entanglements, which will make them suffer and which will create problems both for themselves and for their children, will also be seedily present there.

The hope for the existence of healthy - functional children is based on the quality of the companionship of their parents. But couples are carrying a lot of weight today. They are called to cope with too many issues of everyday life. The negotiation of different points of view in small daily actions, instead of leading to the production of new solutions to new problems, is instead experienced as daily wear and tear for parents. Negotiation takes on the feel of conflict rather than composition.

In addition, the couple is subjected to a barrage of painful stimuli from the supersystem. In the past the existence of socio-economic components, such as work, led to the breakdown of the traditional family and the emergence of the nuclear family. Today we should realize that the social components not only do not favor, but rather hinder the existence of the family based on a monogamous relationship of the parents. The existence of children is an obstacle in the career of many women who unfortunately live with dilemmas. It favors lonely people in the fertile productive age resulting in the production of lonely, unsatisfied, unhappy people in late life.

If I refer again to the cinema we will see that there are really no functional models of married couples presented. Remember who love is as a model married couple. There is no. Some famous romances we have from classical literature involve couples who killed themselves because their relationship was thwarted and therefore never got to be together after all.

I wonder. Do the therapists hope that there can be a romantic relationship within the marriage? Do therapists take care of their partner relationship? Are they fighting for love in their lives? Do they take care of feeding him?
The love that means the power of life. Do they fight it in their personal lives or are they left in an unloved life? Therefore, how to become catalysts that will facilitate an anotropic life and not fall into symptom managers? The question has to be answered before therapists enter a family session.

The emotional burden that Psychiatrists accept in the daily exclusive dealing with the management of mental illness is enormous. There are well-intentioned Psychiatrists, with very good potential, who have dealt with de-assimilation and have been assimilated themselves. Psychiatrists usually deal with a chronically established mental illness. They risk losing hope that mental illness can be reversed and thus engaging in a self-fulfilling prophecy of confirming its chronicity.

I referred earlier to the problems created by the structure of the auditorium affecting the relationship between us. Now the noise of the wheel has entered our midst. Do you hear the whistling of the wheel? (There is disturbing noise made by some workers outside the auditorium...). From outside comes the noise of the wheel. Is it difficult for you or not? So we are in the community. The supersystem interferes with the noise that makes it difficult for us. Accordingly, Healers cannot remain unaffected by the structure of the social supersystem. Public Centers are in danger of losing their momentum. They risk disincentivizing competent therapists who wish to provide meaningful holistic treatments.

In the next room dealing with addiction problems, they can only refer to the meaning of "life without meaning". Does a psychiatric group in the public have a meaning of life? How will he mark it? We have to find out. How will the members of the therapeutic group be fed, since the supersystem is depriving them? What do they have to do with each other so that they animate their structure so that they can take satisfaction?

I will be clear. Accepting the truth about limitations set by the State framework cannot mean passive acceptance of "nothing can be done" that leads to the fulfillment of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The manager of each mental health unit has to fight to organize the team of experts. The problems of personnel selection, space, remuneration, incentives, training and supervision are important matters in which the Director should give due concern. Otherwise the existence of public units will only be motivated by the establishment of some jobs for special addicts in a meaningless life.

Correspondingly, in the private sphere, what values can therapists offer if money is their only motivating force?

Therefore the importance of the personal values of the Therapist clearly emerges. If it is true, and indeed it is, that the therapist is not a neutral observer but an interactive member of the therapeutic relationship, then therapists who do not wish to dwell only on symptoms but work with the whole person should examine their own course. I'm not just referring to technical issues. I'm not just referring to the Healer's need for healing. Rather, I am not referring to moral issues, but I am wondering about the ethos that the Healer has cultivated and that governs his relationships. I am concerned with the responsibility towards the people who trust us and the respect with which we must deal with situations.

I close with the topic that has occupied humanity these days. The technical feasibility of cloning and the ethical problems it poses.
So I wonder if cloning in Psychiatry has already been implemented and paid off? Has a large section of Psychiatrists already been cloned by the Pharmaceutical Companies to reproduce the same speech and think the same way?

Therefore, in closing, I would like to emphasize the fertilizing power of the Systemic Reason that allows the existence of differences that may contain tensions, but which are creative, since they preserve both the possibility of understanding the whole system, and the uniqueness of the personal element.

This is accomplished when the Truth, which can never be expressed individually, is served by one who claims to possess infallibility, but only by the Liturgical Assembly and gathering of persons who know that the Truth lies in the acceptance of no one's infallibility, but who nevertheless experience the Truth in their coexistence.

Dimitris Karagiannis
Conference "Systemic therapy-Family therapy in Greece today", Thessaloniki 1997