Psychologist · 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.

EN FR GR
RI
Paris, France
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Staying with
what is
actually there

I am a psychologist and 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. Alongside the clinical work, I write — essays, books, clinical reflections — because I have found that the room and the page teach each other things. The Relational Integrity framework emerged from both.

"The question is never whether your life makes sense to others. It is whether it can begin to make sense to you."

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.

The word integrity carries its older meaning here: not merely honesty, but wholeness. The condition in which the parts of something cohere — not because they've been arranged into a pleasing order, but because they are genuinely related to one another.

Read the full framework →

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.

Couples Therapy · Relational Integrity

Love
Dictionary

A Relational Lexicon for Couples

Communication problems in relationships often arise not from a failure of language but from differing interior definitions of the same words. This dictionary offers language for what has until now been difficult to name.

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I occasionally send new essays from the consulting room. Unsubscribe anytime.

I — Wanting

  • Desire
  • Longing

IV — Negotiation

  • Freedom
  • Control

II — Rupture

  • Betrayal
  • Repair

V — Without a Dictionary

  • Situationship
  • Breadcrumbing
  • Orbiting

III — Absence

  • Distance
  • Withdrawal

VI — Conflict

  • Conflict
  • Sulking

Silence

From Latin silentium — the condition of being still, of withholding sound

"In a relationship, silence is never merely the absence of speech. It is a form of communication with its own grammar — protection, punishment, grief, or the thing that has not yet found its words."

Browse all 19 entries →

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

The consulting room is on the fourth floor of a building in the Marais — 9 rue Saint-Merri, Paris 75004. It is quiet in the way that rooms become quiet when they've held a lot of serious conversation. You take the stairs. There is a chair by the window, and another across from it.

If something here has named something in your experience, I offer an initial conversation — 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

Fees

Sessions are between €90 and €160, depending on circumstance. A sliding scale is available for those for whom the standard fee represents a genuine barrier — I'd rather discuss it than have the question sit unspoken. Most French health insurance does not cover psychotherapy; I provide receipts in whatever format your insurer requires.

Address 9 rue Saint-Merri, Paris 75004
Languages English · Français · Ελληνικά
Format In-person & Online