Psychotherapist · Author · Paris
Nikos
Marinos
A relational psychoanalytic practice for those who want to think as well as feel their way through what is not working.
Staying with
what is
actually there
I am a psychodynamic psychotherapist based in Paris, working in English, French, and Greek. My practice draws on relational psychoanalysis, attachment theory, and the framework I have developed over years of clinical and writing work: Relational Integrity.
The people who find their way to my consulting room are often high-functioning in their professional lives — and quietly struggling in the places that matter most: relationships, identity, desire, loss, the slow accumulation of compromises that begins to feel like a life.
I work with individuals and couples. The work is rigorous, patient, and aimed not at symptom management but at genuine relational change — the kind that holds.
You may be in the right
place if some of this
is familiar
01
The articulate person who can't explain themselves
You think well. You write well. And yet, when it comes to the closest relationships in your life, language collapses. You know something is wrong and cannot say what.
02
The person between languages, cultures, or identities
You live between worlds — linguistic, cultural, erotic, professional. You have learned to be fluent in all of them and at home in none of them. This in-between is where I work.
03
The one who keeps finding the same impasse
The relationship ends the same way. The work cycle repeats. The intimacy closes down at the same moment. You are not broken — you are patterned. Patterns can be understood.
04
Those navigating loss, transition, or unfinished grief
Not all grief is acute. Some of it is slow, structural — the loss of a version of yourself, a relationship that ended before it ended, a future that quietly stopped being available.
05
Couples who still care but can no longer reach each other
The arguments are not about what they are about. Something has been lost between you, or never quite found. Couples work in my practice is exploratory, not corrective.
06
The high-achiever quietly exhausted by their own performance
You have succeeded at almost everything and feel, privately, less than fine. What you have built does not match what you feel. This gap deserves serious attention.
A framework
for how we
stay with
each other
Relational Integrity is the conceptual framework underpinning my clinical and writing work. It is not a model or a method — it is an orientation. Six principles that describe what it takes to remain genuinely present in close relationships, including the therapeutic one.
I
Presence Without Rescue
Being with another person without the compulsion to fix, advise, or resolve their difficulty.
II
Symbolic Honesty
Speaking the truth of inner experience in ways that invite rather than foreclose connection.
III
Emotional Responsibility
Owning what is ours without projecting its weight onto others.
IV
Narrative Integrity
Holding our stories lightly — seriously, but not as prison — open to revision.
V
Secure Ambivalence
The capacity to hold contradictory feelings about someone without forcing premature resolution.
VI
Symbolic Pacing
Honouring the organic, non-linear rhythm at which real relational change actually moves.
The clinical work
continues in prose
Essay Series
Staying With
Literary-clinical essays on love, desire, aging, and the difficulty of sustained intimacy in contemporary life.
Essay Series
Designing a Self
On identity, multiplicity, and the structures we build — and keep rebuilding — to make a liveable interior.
Essay Series
Letters After the End
Correspondence as clinical form: what gets said when it is finally safe to say it, after something has closed.
Essay Series
What Hurts, What Holds
On the paradox of attachment — that what binds us is often the same thing that injures us, and we return anyway.
A first
conversation
costs
nothing
If something here has named something in your experience, I offer an initial consultation — free of charge — to see whether my way of working and your particular difficulty might be a useful fit.
Sessions take place in my Paris consulting room, or online. I work in English, French, and Greek, and I have particular experience with clients navigating transcultural lives.
Write to Me