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One of the disadvantages of scientists from small countries who publish in their native language is that their work remains usually unrecognized or poorly appreciated by the rest of the world. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts (or shall I say, psychiatry and psychoanalysis?) suffer the most. Ironically, psychiatrists and in particular psychoanalysts who write in English all but ignore the contributions of colleagues in other languages, including the major ones, French, German and Spanish.
Professor Kouretas writes and teaches in Greek (do I need to say modern Greek?), the language of an illustrious but small country, and is relatively unknown to outsiders, in particular English speaking colleagues. Since he was retired from the position of Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the National University of Athens by an arbitrary age limit set by the Colonels' law, he is no longer the official voice of academic psychiatry, but remains still the senior representative of psychoanalysis in Greece, indeed one among a handful of analysts—three or four, actually, among the several hundred psychiatrists who practise in the country, mainly in Athens.
Trained in France during the 1920s by Laforgue, Kouretas fought hard to make psychoanalysis respectable in Greece. Except for a brief stint in Adlerian psychology during the 1930s, he remained faithful to the basic tenets of Freudian theory, taking upon himself to explain and defend it among fellow scientists, psychiatrists and, like Freud in his early years, medical colleagues of all disciplines—not an easy or grateful task. But he also addressed