Report from Abroad: A Letter from Greece

In his letter from Portugal (JAPA 47/2), our colleague Pedro Luzes noted that in 1915 the neuropsychiatrist Egas Moniz became the first to introduce Freud's theories to that country. Decades later he would receive the Nobel prize for his discovery of lobotomy, thought for a time to be the ultimate treatment for schizophrenia. The same year as in Portugal, Freud's theory was presented in Greece for the first time by a classical scholar and linguist, Manolis Triandaphyllidis. Many years later, in 1938, Triandaphyllidis published the first scientific grammar of modern Greek, which contributed decisively to the solution of a linguistic schizophrenia—the existence of two languages, the archaic or purist and the vernacular or demotic—that had for centuries bedeviled Greek society. Triandaphyllidis gave a concise description of psychoanalysis, explaining the theory of the unconscious, which, as Freud did initially, he called the subconscious, and the basic defense mechanisms of repression, projection, and sublimation. He had become acquainted with psychoanalysis during his postgraduate studies in Munich, and maintained a lively interest in it to the end of his creative life. In his archives is a postcard from Freud, dated February 27, 1920, in which the father of psychoanalysis addresses him as “dear colleague.”

Much more elaborate than Triandaphyllidis's presentation is an essay published in 1924 by Yannis Imvriotis, a psychologist who had studied in Germany and Paris. Presented in weekly sessions to the same learned society where Triandaphyllidis had given his lecture on Freud a decade earlier, it covers theoretical principles, dream interpretation, and therapeutic technique, the last illustrated with clinical examples. A year later, the parapsychologist and short story writer Angelos Tanagras published an article about psychoanalysis in his journal Psychic Research. A diploma honoring the founder of the science of the unconscious, signed by Tanagras, figures prominently