PERSON – INDIVIDUAL
In everyday language the meaning of face is often distorted. Being called a person, a person, defines more the person, the individual. They consider person and person almost as synonymous terms.
One or the other term is used indifferently to express the same thing. However, in one sense person and person have opposite meanings. The individual is the alienation of the uniqueness of the person, the attempt to define personal uniqueness with individual properties of common nature by comparisons and analogies.

The face is highlighted in relation to the other authentic faces. Each person highlights other aspects of ourselves, our face. Since man is one nature and many faces.

The uniqueness and dissimilarity of the face refers to man's initial relationship with the source of life, i.e. man's ethos.

The encounter with the authentic – true face of another is a contact with the transcendent and the timeless, with something stronger than death.

The expression "I love you" means "you will never die".

Isolated, independent, we lose the authenticity of the person and become an individual, a mere unit ranked in the census.

The failure of the closed universe of the impermeable ego results in the loss of the richness of human relationships and degenerates into misery where everything begins and ends with the individual.
Self-centeredness is the death of true personality. Love cannot exist in isolation, but presupposes the other.
The face is unruly. He refuses to use it and to subjugate it.

The person may feel over-satisfied with having their needs met, since they are stripped of their ability to relate. He does not have the ability to know what anguish means, since he is impervious to the pain of others. Until, of course, he is unexpectedly touched by unhappiness in his own space and then exclaims: "Why do all the bad things happen to me?"
SOCIETY – A-SOCIETY
Institutionalized society, while praising the family, in fact antagonizes it and seeks to subjugate it into a utilitarian unit.

The post-industrial A-society of multinationals, consolidated trusts, managers hates the concept of face. It perversely uses all psychological knowledge to subjugate the person.
The A – Internet society of images and sounds, information and transactions is expanding. The ability to access information and databases does not require travel or an intermediary teacher - a carrier of knowledge and experience. The elements you are dealing with are not the other, since you are not you, in this transaction.

In other words, society mutates into an A-Society that deifies the mass media, but prevents the society of persons, who require sharing of life and not a simple exchange of knowledge or feelings.
The cloned employee must have no personal life. Its values must be those of the company. The company's salespeople must become the same. To dress alike, to speak alike, to "think" alike. In other words, every personal element is considered a burden from which they must get rid of at all costs. It is considered something like countertransference.

The commoditized A-market society is based on profit. It is looking for new markets to promote its products. The cheaper, that is, mass produced, the cheaper they can be sold to more people, now called consumers. Therefore it should be addressed to the same people as possible, who have the same needs.

Individuals have the same needs. Individuals have different desires. To strip them of their desires, he overwhelms their needs. Leisure, love, fun, hobbies, vacations, religiosity, are potential commodities.

In exchange for this massiveness, the illusion of choosing between different proposals, packages or models is offered.

The traditional object has ceased to be traditional, since it is included in an impersonal relationship. Like the recipe of the traditional food of Mrs. Elli, which has also become a label...

And what will happen? Is the destruction of everything coming? Will everything fall apart? Will we become an A-society of lonely individuals? Where the only transaction will be virtual – fantasy and not reality?

The traditional way of life provided the possibility of interdependence because people were integrated into the community group.

In today's era, after realizing the impasse of self-sufficiency, man is called upon to create human groups where he can join by making use of the opportunity of our time, which is the many options.

He also has to learn to live with interdependence but also to defend his person and his personal achievements.

Apart from the other structures, there is also the possibility of the family. Not as an object of research into her psychopathology, but as a life-saving subject. The child develops in his family whose quality of life is decisively defined by the quality of the relationship of the married couple.
THE COUPLE
Romantic love has this characteristic, in it the breaking of isolation and the elevation towards wholeness is attempted.

Two people trying to co-exist as a pair of trading persons enter into an unlikely journey of risk, since nothing tomorrow will be the same. The output of their relationship will constantly differentiate them. Looking for functionality, nothing guarantees them that their past will be reproduced.

It is the inner certainty about themselves that gives them the right to attempt it. It is the trust and appreciation in the face of the other partner that prompts them to meet. They hope that meeting the other person will illuminate and highlight other sides of themselves. So the other – the real other and not the imaginary ideal other – and getting along with them is an exercise – with its attendant costs and benefits. The practitioner becomes stronger and discovers possibilities that he did not have before.

Love can develop either within a self-constructed framework of fantasy images, or in a constant struggle between two people. But never among people who expect a utilitarian coverage of some of their individual sexual or other needs.

Two people - halves who expect fulfillment from their coexistence will lead to frustrations and the consequent disappointments. In psychological misery.

Two people trying to justify themselves will be led to a model of dominance - power. They must secure their individual rights and individual diversity, which is based on different individual characteristics. Otherwise they cease to exist - they are lost, since they are assimilated and their individuality disappears. So competition and strife confirm their existence and that is why they must not stop fighting.
But despite all the huge battles with the consequent enormous wastes of energy and shockingly stormy situations, things remain as they are. Nothing is assimilated. No substantial fermentation takes place. And the members after years of coexistence remain the same. Immature and insecure.

Sometimes the other partner gives up and the sterile Narcissus-Echoes couple reproduces.

In the couple's struggle for supremacy, the other is necessary not to trade, but to impose on him and ultimately destroy him. And relationship does not produce life, but death. In embracing love the lover seeks the one who will complete him...

Every relationship has to function as an inter-ethnic marriage, where the diversity of the other is recognized as wealth and the goal is to exploit it. Otherwise if it is seen as an obstacle it should be eliminated resulting in the deterioration and disappearance of the relationship.

Lust not for the other, but for the resulting third, which is something more than the sum of the two lovers.
CHILD
The child would never enter the world of people, the world of language and symbols, personal identity and names if there were no people to love him.

The relationship with the mother is vital. Nourishment, possibility of life, dynamic fullness of relationship. If care was not accompanied by the fullness of maternal presence (talk, caress, gesture of affection) the relationship would ensure survival, not life.

The father's interference gradually emerges in the infant's relationship with the mother. Decisive for the expansion and realization of the child's subjectivity, the prevention of his imaginary identification with the maternal body – widening and opening up the vital relation to the social event.

The faces of the father and the mother imprint on the soul of the child, the models of the psychosomatic difference, which makes possible the vital relationship, the complementarity, the poetic potential of life.
Such a relationship allows the development of children with their own diversity. Such a relationship allows openness to society and their diversity. It allows for open systems.

Brain development on a biological level is related to the development of new synapses between neurons. Accordingly, the child's face emerges with the development of authentic relationships with others.
In order for the human person to be saved, his uniqueness needs to be recognized within the family system.

Reducing children to predetermined roles inhibits their freedom and locks them into dysfunctional patterns.
SYSTEM AND PERSON
Systemic perception is not a mass perception. It is not limited to the cumulative perception of the members of a set. He considers that a system relationship exists only when there is transaction and interaction. Therefore, it defines the face. He is looking for his manifestations. He knows that the person alone - isolated from his relations does not exist. The face exists in the gaze of the other and in his own gaze towards the other. Every new relationship is an opportunity for other sides to emerge. Every "old" relationship that deepens brings out both its depth and its richness. That is why the other can be a blessing.

The therapist does not relate to the family to fill its energy gaps with his own contribution. It participates as a catalyst that will allow the interaction of family members towards the utilization of its own strengths. A therapist who does not listen to and does not tap into the energy sources of the family, who does not tap into their own culture, is not just a therapist who will get tired, but a therapist who does not know how to respect human persons.

The systemic therapist does not consider the process of connecting with the family, the joining phase, as a simple prelude to the continuation of the treatment, but an essential opportunity to get to know the specific people and establish a special personal relationship with each member and the specific moment.

The therapist is not looking for behavior change techniques that will lead to getting rid of the symptom, he is not anxious about what to say to the patients, but about how to listen to them.
When the therapist is authentic as a person, then he does not remain the same, but evolves during his professional life and can catalyze the process of emergence of persons - members of the family.
EPILOGUE
When you experience human relationships like this, in such a community of persons, you learn to relate personally - uniquely - not only emotionally - to your neighborhood, community tap or bridges. And then you write poems and songs about bridges that are not intangible, utilitarian objects, but part of your life.

These are strange sentiments for some civilized people, of another culture – where such a relationship is not understood – not understood. Then they can build smart bombs that bomb bridges, but they don't have that intelligence to understand that some underdeveloped people, holding candles of the Resurrection, are standing at the risk of their lives on these bridges, defending not the transportation and traffic of goods, but the good of saving the human person.

Dimitris Karagiannis
1st Panhellenic Child Psychiatry Conference, Athens 1999