The moments of eternity

A distinguished psychiatrist searches for the transcendence of death in love, explains why freedom is hidden in binding partner relationships, redefines fatherhood, while shaking off the dictatorship of the first five years of our lives. 

"A thankful way of life is one that does not promise us the absence of difficulties, toil, suffering, diseases, old age, but that all of these are ultimately useful for our completion. The Eucharistic lifestyle experiences the here and now, as each moment encompasses eternity. The little flower that comes out without anyone having cultivated it and that encloses the unfathomable beauty. The passionate look of young people in love. The tender, confident and grateful look of the elderly companions", notes, among others, in his interview with the "schedia" the psychiatrist Dimitris Karagiannis, scientific director of the Psychotherapeutic and Educational Institute "ANTISTIXI" and director of the Child Mental Hygiene Center. How is the eucharistic living of life countered by a shallow optimism? How are fatherhood and femininity defined today? Why can love conquer death? Why is freedom found in relationships of commitment? Does man change, after all, and under what conditions? These issues (and not only) are investigated by Mr. Karagiannis speaking in the "schedia".

Propose the Eucharistic experience of life. How does this differ from artificial optimism or "positive thinking"? 

Depression tends to be the major infectious disease of the modern world. Generations that fought for survival and fulfilled their duty came full circle tired and wondering. Children of the duty generation sought entertainment as an answer to grumbling and boredom. Obsessive duty that knew no joy gave birth to consuming pleasure, cut off from toil. The absence of universal meaning, which gives reason to existence, is clumsily attempted to be covered by individual occupational therapy activities, the absence of joy in the incessant mass provision of pleasure, the tragic loneliness of individual pleasure. The imperative of "don't worry" tends to become a universal imperative. Entertainment, when it becomes an end in itself, when it is not connected to the overall course of our life, but autonomously seeks to replace life itself, is precisely what it aims for. To fill in the blanks. To hide the absurdity of existence. To cover the fear of pain, disease and death. The command "Do not be upset" is not aimed at the one to whom it is addressed, but at the one who expresses it. If we translate it, we will hear: "Don't be upset and make sure you have a good time, because I can't stand unpleasant situations." A shallow optimism according to which we should not think about the difficult, the painful, but only the painless. How many know that the latest psychiatric classification of the American Psychiatric Association categorizes bereavement of a loved one as depression, requiring antidepressant medication? This attitude of "positive thinking", recorded in the various books of applied psychology, finds a response, as it promises a vague happiness that is achieved without many conditions. Yoga exercises framed with some eastern sayings meet spa relaxation centers and are an attempt to forget the tormenting question of existence. A desperate effort, which while aiming to avoid sadness, is a deeply depressing attitude. At critical moments, the sedative of positive thinking and the corresponding ways of escape have no effect and leave you hopelessly abandoned and helpless. Not feeling sorry is equivalent to not feeling. We suffer because we are free. The denial of the agony of life corresponds to the denial of the self itself. The opposite of this casual attitude of "think positive" is the eucharistic view of life, which is based on the certainty that death does not exist as an entity. A thankful way of life is one that does not promise us the absence of difficulties, toil, suffering, diseases, old age, but that all of these are ultimately useful for our completion. The Eucharistic lifestyle experiences the here and now, as each moment encompasses eternity. The little flower that comes out without anyone having cultivated it and that encloses the unfathomable beauty. The passionate look of young people in love. The tender, confident and grateful look of the elderly companions. A melody. A dance. An apology. A caring child with Down syndrome. A craftsman with passion. An employee who serves you with interest.

You believe that truly free relationships are those based on commitment. Doesn't it sound somewhat contradictory, in an age, indeed, where there is a difficulty in commitment?

Difficulty in commitment seems to be a common diagnosis in people who live in frequent sexual relationships, and when the time comes to make the relationship official, they look for reasons to disappear. The problem of these people does not lie in the difficulty of commitment, but in the unbearable and leveling commitment they often have with the paternal family and with their burdened personal past. The young people who find it difficult to commit to relationships are not the single people, but the bound children of their paternal families. They are allowed the love game that will relax them, but not the marriage that will take them away from parenthood. Women who raised their children alone in the context of a predetermined single-parent family, a widow, an abusive divorce or a non-existent marriage unconsciously tend to find it difficult to empower their children and create a serious relationship, which would take them away from them. Prolonged suspension of commitment in the love relationship does not lead to freedom, but to the loss of love desire. Refusing to stand up for your choice is choosing the unrepentant attitude: "I'm not leaving, but I'm not sure I want to stay." He who accepts such a lukewarm relationship loses his eroticism and ends up a beggar who begs. The art of postponing commitment knows how to convey the personal inadequacy of amorous passion to the other, who is registered as unable to charm or "little", who asks for reassurance. The fear, moreover, of commitment is anchored in a childlike omnipotent bulimic sense that wants to lose nothing and that thinks it can have it all. Therefore, if he chooses one person for a lifetime relationship, he will lose the ability to relate to others. Regardless of the widely held view that it was some liberals who challenged marriage as an important value in people's lives, the real opponents of marriage were conservative people. They slandered marriage by alienating it from the joy, the cheerfulness and the daily celebration it deserves, among other things, to be. They identified him with oppressive duty, constant exhausting sacrifice, and flattened daily routine. Children of these parents are those who proclaim: "I do not marry." Full commitment and exclusivity in the love relationship, however, is not a deprivation, a requirement and a punishment, but a possibility, an opportunity and a privilege. Partners are not content with pleasant company that dissolves "with the first raindrops", but form an "all-weather" relationship. 

You have pointed out that the danger in our time is not pansexuality, but asexuality. Why and how is this connected to the prevalence of what you call "impersonal sex"? 

There is a tendency to devalue love, which is defined in consumer terms and as a simple sexual satisfaction. Unbridled impersonal sexuality, having removed the juices of amorous tenderness and amorous surprise, has withered the flower of the amorous relationship. It is a compulsive processing of a backlog that needs to be covered, resulting in a significant percentage of people giving up on the search for love in their lives. It is worth wondering about asexuals, young people, that is, who, while having the potential for numerous sexual relationships, feel a complete lack of sexual interest. Asexuals are the people who could not live three months without an internet connection or their tablet, while they have no difficulty living three years without a love affair. This attitude that manifests an apathy, i.e. a lack of passion for love, is the result of an oversupply of available sexual stimuli that creates a confusion about the very nature of love. The love affair is recorded as a threat to individuality, requiring an over-effort in order not to be absorbed into the other. Therefore, the preservation of individuality dictates the avoidance of close personal relationship and recourse to opportunistic sex. A 30-year-old man told me: "Women are attractive to me, but I have learned to live without love. Emotional relationships seem to me a very complicated matter." The suffocating pressure for professional recognition, where the priority is the career, does not allow for the existence of competitors that will require time and energy. On the other hand, easy and immediate gratification either in the form of casual sex, or with technological online porn and virtual reality, is also looking for customers to offer them sexual relief. Promises of pleasure, however, seem not to be kept. The results of extensive research among American university students show that casual sex did not bring well-being, while it was related to the creation of discomfort, depression and anxiety. 

How can love really be a personal choice that transcends death, as you claim? 

There are two diametrical positions in how love meets the awareness of mortality. The first freezes before the reality of death and reacts with the neurotic mechanism of denial. Sex temporarily masks the fear of death. From the realization of the final end that there is no way to avoid it, terror is created. Sexuality is the most direct way to mask despair in the face of death. In societies that allow comfortable references to death, references to sex are taboo and governed by corresponding prohibitions. But in societies where sexual references abound, such as in the modern West, references to death are dramatically curtailed and embellished. The stormy reference to sex serves as a superficial cover-up for all the difficulties of life. Autonomous sex these days is a very common sedative and is offered in large doses to cover up people's real difficulties. The use of sex as a sedative mainly concerns the two extreme economic classes, the penniless who feel their lives have been flattened and are desperately looking for some pleasure, even momentary, to escape the problems of destitution, and those businessmen whose compulsive collection of autonomous gain becomes a hyper-anxious compulsion that requires much-needed relaxation. Sex, however, which does not recognize the face of the other, in the context of a desperate individual escape, has the taste of death. Tragically painful is the attitude of some elderly people who, in their panic in the face of death, try to hide by pretending to be young. The second attitude to the certainty of death is a brave awareness of its harsh presence and the shocking humiliation it brings. It is the search for love that answers individual mortality, that erases the leveling futility that emanates from the end of existence. The old couple who insist on living their love and despite the time do not give up the expression of their tenderness, insist on not losing a single second of their life, not to avoid the fact of death, but because they have a transcendent, resurrectable, love attitude that overwhelms him. 

You note that modern times allow for the repositioning of the paternity theme. In what way;

The issue of masculinity and femininity in the past was settled in rigid terms, where emotions were allowed to women but not to men and reason was listed as the exclusive prerogative of men. Today, the modern man has won the right to have a personal relationship with children and to enjoy the demanding status of fatherhood, which generations of men were denied. The children had an emotional relationship only with their mother, while the father intervened only in emergency situations, such as in serious illness or where the mother called him to enforce order. The status of paternity is provided and brought forth by the mother. A woman who is satisfied with her husband will bring him up as a father figure to her children, while a woman who is in conflict with her husband or the father of her children will stand in the way of the relationship and undermine it. It is clear that a satisfying partnership is the basis for having a functional child-father relationship. Children of dysfunctional partner relationships, identifying with the mother, deny the emotional relationship with the father, whom they reject, with the corresponding consequences in their psycho-emotional development and in their sexual identity. The father does not have to educate the children as the mother will indicate. He is free to relate to his children with vitality and risk. The man who faithfully follows the card in the supermarket loses his sexuality, as does the father who becomes a "ba-ma". She has reversed the roles and competes with the mother. Frustrated with his own course, he tries to draw some satisfaction from his children. Fatherhood that finds its way to exist and enjoy it, not only does not take away masculinity, but can contribute to the renewal of the couple's sexuality. 

On the other hand, why do you emphasize that femininity is intertwined with the possibility of recruiting the other? 

Femininity is identified with employability, but intertwined with freedom. She does not accept fatally what is imposed on her. It is not a vacuum that anyone can enter whenever they want. This is not a defense against the man, but a condition for him to have the woman present. Femininity is characterized by the possibility of recruitment in freedom, but it is not limited there. It is also the transformation of what is taken in, the transformation of a cell into life. Traditional women who had to serve in harsh conditions for survival found a way to save their creative femininity, utilizing their passion and beautifying the necessary. To sew the necessary clothing, but also to embroider the lace. Older women who have not married and who have had no sexual relationship may have a femininity whose beauty has in a secret way contributed to the rescue of genuine love desire. They are the ones who have not experienced deprivation, but have transformed love into other forms of total giving and tenderly surround the new love couples and pray for the rescue of love. Authentic femininity finds ways to give birth to life, even if it never gives birth. It is the womb of life. The creation that is not only about the birth of a child, but the emergence of life. A destruction of femininity, however, takes place, for example, in those organizations dominated by competition for jobs. Women, in the context of their career, sacrifice their personal sensitivity, their personal life. On the outside, they may be elegant and desirable, but their inner juices have dried up. Femininity has ceased to be an internal quality and has turned into a weapon to achieve other people's goals. Deeply hurt in the process of their ascension, they have renounced their very selves, they cannot give, they cannot receive. They only know how to demand and claim. 

You interpret panic disorder as a conflict of desire with responsibility. How does it manifest itself?

When the desire for change in critical life decisions conflicts with responsibility, then failure to understand and process the mental conflict produces this tsunami of stress, which overwhelms existence and immobilizes it. Panic disorder is experienced by people who struggle with the huge waves of desire that overwhelm them, but also with their responsibility not to surrender uncritically to them. Their desires are incriminated. Their desires were for a long period of their lives suspended. Their families of origin were closed systems whose opening was registered as disaster. Where the tensions and conflicts were so intense, that they did not allow the expression of the child's desire, without this causing a series of arguments between the parents. He has a similar feeling as an adult, when he feels that he is in trapped situations, from which he wants to escape, but does not know how. A young woman felt trapped in her long-term relationship with a man who was a "good boy" but who settled for little. Coming home from work he was exhausted and all he wanted was to relax and then sleep. He avoided romantic intimacy and when they did, things were transactional. At the same time, a colleague at work was heavily flirting with her and inviting her to cultural events that interested her. At first she responded relatively innocently, but then felt that her motivation was not only cultural, but their communication. At that time he also had his first episode of panic disorder. Such panic episodes are often the occasion for significant changes in the lives of worthy people, who are not calmed down by a sedative or a relaxation exercise. It is truly tragic to lose the opportunity to understand themselves and to question the meaning of life that they are called to conquer, when they resort to – and unfortunately uncritically provided to them – exclusively medicinal preparations or superficial tricks, techniques that may partially relieve them and temporarily from the symptom. 

You emphasize that the worker who works only for the money "commits prostitution". Isn't there a rift these days between work and personal life that we expect to derive satisfaction from?

The employee in a shoe store who feels that work time should be subtracted from life time will grumble every time she has to show off a pair of shoes. She herself after a few years will have leveled off and will talk disparagingly not only about her work, but also about her life and herself. Another employee, however, who has decided to live virtually all the hours of her day will not be the faceless employee suffering from boredom as she opens and closes shoe boxes. He will look for the personal relationship with the client and will gain a meaningful contact with him. The doctor who only wants the sachet has given up the pleasure of enjoying the contact with the patient. He has refused to experience the existential questions posed by the disease. Accordingly, an executive of a multinational company can have no other thought than to increase some numbers and decrease others. When there is no immediate satisfaction from the object of work, financial or non-financial bonuses fill the void. The harshest situation concerns those who prove important to the company and rise in the hierarchy, but in their few personal moments they painfully wonder about the sense of emptiness in their personal lives and the lack of meaning. It is true that the attitude towards work ultimately carries with it the attitude towards all aspects of life. It is not possible for a professional to think extremely competitively at work and be cooperative with his partner. It is not possible for a professional to be unscrupulous in his professional relationships and not transfer this attitude to his children. In the context of caring for a child who presented with some behavioral problems, it was required to visit the school and work with the principal. In a bored tone he said with surprise: "Is it possible to imagine that with the money the state gives me I will deal with the problems of every child?" The comment: "The state is depriving you of the material reward of your labor, but you will be depriving yourself of the satisfaction you would get from taking care of the children," did not seem to touch him. It seems that many times the focus on a real or perceived injustice acts as an alibi for the pre-determined renunciation of responsibility in life. The generalization, moreover, of the scandals that arise in social, political and economic life serves this. The cover-up of personal leveling, personal resignation, personal embarrassment, personal misdeeds.

It is widely believed that man is formed in the first years of his life, it is a port of his childhood traumas and experiences and from then on he remains unchanged. To what extent is this true?

There was this dictatorship of the first five years of life, that the whole personality is determined in these years and then we follow. There is a truth to this, because elements that are decisive in the creation of our character, such as whether we will be extroverted or introverted, whether we are favored in having social skills are greatly influenced by this relationship of the first years of our life. It is not the givens, however, that define my identity, so much as my acquired ones. My identity is not the beginning of my life, so much as what I have become through conscious changes over time. The essential elements of life are how we go about it and what meaning we give to it, something that does not close at five years of life, or at 18, or at 30. We see people who are diagnosed with cancer and, suddenly, they wonder about their entire lives and make decisions about drastic changes not because of the fear of death, but because they want their lives to have meaning. The understanding of the adult brain as a static organ that develops predestinedly to a certain age and is then subject to decay has dominated until very recently. Today, it is now also laboratory confirmed that the human brain is influenced and shaped by the life experiences it has or the life experiences it chooses to experience. That is, the person himself can on a conscious level decide to change the way he has shaped his personality, behaviors and skills, confirming the systemic and existential view in psychotherapy, as the possibility of not being the given self is also recorded biologically us, but the self we choose to be. 

Why guilt, but not even criticism can be a springboard to change a person?

Changes are personal life decisions that we make for ourselves and never at the demand, suggestion or request of others. Advice or reprimands seem logically irresistible. But they are ineffective because they don't look for the inner unspoken causes responsible for the negative behaviors we can't let go of. Similarly, for the student who was excellent but is stuck in the three courses before the end of his studies, exhortations that he "must read" will have the opposite effect, because it will increase his guilt and lead him to further withdrawal. He will look for the reasons why he does not read and will not dare to realize the reasons that make him not want to finish his studies. Because he will have to change his place of residence. Because reading is not a problem for him, but the continuation of his life once he finishes his studies. The demand to change the other made in the context of his manipulation registers the other as an object and not as a person who has his own freedom. In criticism, at the same time you judge the other person for their failure and demand their change, at the same time you value yourself as perfect and deny any change of your own. In fact, you are criticizing what you unconsciously desire. Therefore, easy criticism is an unconscious envy. That is why it coexists with tension. The stoning that supposedly wants to enforce morality is exactly what it hides. The guilty lust for her being stoned. It is the loving gaze that inspires change, that highlights, that heals. It is the look of trust that knows weaknesses and inadequacies, but insists on strengths and abilities. An educational team surveyed high school students who had significant variation in their grades from one year to the next. One incident made a particular impression on them. A student who in 2nd High School had a grade of 11.5 reached 17.5 in 3rd High School. The story included a twist. At that time, phenomena of theft had been observed. An inspired professor decided to investigate the case. He noticed that the student in question stayed inside during recess and saw him stealing money and items from his classmates who were in the courtyard. Then he immediately approached him and said: “We both know what you have done. I'll forget it, you won't. Make sure you get it right." The following year found him not only not forgetting his failure, but making use of it and offering the transcendence as a counter-gift to the teacher for her loving gaze, which surrounded him in his error