Nikos Nikolaidis

Nikos Nikolaidis has been working in the fields of mental health and clinical pathology for half a century. He received his initial training in Greece (graduating from the Medical School of the University of Athens in 1953, obtaining a doctorate from the same school in 1959, and becoming a specialist in neuropsychiatry in 1957), but his substantive training took place within the French-speaking world of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in Paris and Geneva, where he has lived since 1967. J. Delay, S. Lebovici, R. Diatkine, J. de Ajuriaguerra, P. Marty and M. Fain were the key influences on his thinking, as was the dynamic dialogue with the work of A. Green and P. Aulagnier.

His career, both in academia (as a professor of psychoanalysis from 1973 to 1992 at the Faculty of Psychology, University of Geneva) and in the field of psychoanalysis (a full member of the Swiss Psychoanalytical Society since 1979, a member of the Paris Institute of Psychosomatics -IPSO-R Marty, and since 2001 President of the International Psychosomatic Association) is distinguished. His wide-ranging clinical work, with particular emphasis on psychosis and psychosomatics, combined with his ability to develop theoretical frameworks, has led to a very large number of scientific articles published in the most authoritative French-language psychoanalytic journals and in twelve independent books discussing all the fundamental themes of psychopathology (drive, representation, language, the psychic apparatus, regression, delirium, anxiety, depression), as well as topics concerning the dialectical relationship between psychoanalysis and the human sciences (linguistics, semiotics, mythology). In particular, his work on representation has attracted international interest and has already been translated into Greek, Italian and Portuguese. His younger brother, Aristotelis Nikolaidis, also a neurologist-psychiatrist and writer, has co-authored with him the ingenious French-language work "Dictionnaire des mots inexistants" ("Dictionary of Non-Existent Words"), in which they propose French terms derived exclusively from Greek.