The 8th issue of the electronic magazine Systemic Thinking & Psychotherapy could be called a “special issue”. And this is because it has particularities that exceed its usual structure and format. For example, from some coincidences (which, in fact, may not be so incidental) the history and the present of two countries, Germany and Greece, have “intruded” in it. First there is the text of the German psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Titus Milech “Collective and Personal Identity in Periods of Destabilization”, referring to the history of Nazism through a psychological perspective. Similarly, the text by Ioanna Carystianni “The One and the Others. Creating Personal and Collective Identity in Pages of Prose” reflects experientially on Greece during the German occupation. What follows is a dialogue among Germans in Dresden (headed by Maria Borcsa, president of EFTA) with Katia Charalabaki, on the topic of “Families in a Context of Economic and Social Destabilization: A Meta-Modern Greek Drama”. There is also the article by Professor Johen Schweizer of Heidelberg on “Family Systems Psychiatry (SYMPA)-Training hospital teams to do Family Psychotherapy”. Then there is the article “The ‘Depends on’ and the ‘And’: The Therapist’s Resources in the Era of Magical Images” by the founder and president of the Laboratory for the Study of Human Relations Charis Kataki referring in a vivid way to the borderline situations of today’s family and broader interpersonal relationships in our country, and the new challenges for therapists. And finally, the article “Working with teenagers in inpatient hospitalization. A systemic look at nursing thought and practice” by Constantinos Bletsos describes the systemic nursing interventions in hospitalized, traumatized, borderline teenagers.
So “Germany and Greece, Collective and Personal Identity, Borderline Situations” is not just a title. It is “the theme” of our current issue.
Let us mention also the presentation by Dimitris Kokkalis of the book The Therapeutic Relationship, psychotherapeutic approaches from the psychoanalytic, the cognitive and the systemic perspective, a collective work from Kastaniotis Editions edited by H. Karamanolaki, K. Charalabaki and Y. Michopoulos.
Finally, we have to stop and observe “a moment of silence” for three recent losses: it is for Luigi Onnis, teacher of family therapy and one of the founders of EFTA, our dearest colleague Katerina Dermitzaki and our colleague Stelios Zerefos who had undertaken, voluntarily and free of charge, the technical editing of our electronic magazine Systemic Thinking & Psychotherapy. We will miss them and we will always remember them.
The Editorial Committee