The following are some recent comments by a psychiatric-geneticist and psychologist-neuroscientist, respectively, on the need to pay closer attention to the realm of inner subjective experiences of our patients as well as their relational and socio-cultural contexts.

Kendler (2005 - "Toward a philosophical structure for psychiatry" American Journal of Psychiatry; 162:433-440), in delineating a philosophical structure for psychiatry, underscored the importance of attending to subjective, first-person experiences. He noted:

“Our central goal as a medical discipline is the alleviation of the human suffering that results from dysfunctional alterations in certain domains of first-person, subjective experience...The clinical work of psychiatry constantly requires us to assess and interpret the first-person reports of our patients... While we want to take advantage of the many advances in the neurosciences and molecular biology, this cannot be done at the expense of abandoning our grounding in the world of human mental suffering” (pp.433-434).

As Jaak Panksepp (2004), neuroscientist and author of "Affective Neuroscience" (Oxford University Press), noted in his recent edited volume Textbook of Biological Psychiatry:

"A fuller recognition of basic emotional imbalances of many psychiatric disorders may also help reverse a growing problem of modern psychiatry - the marginalization of patients by making them mere consumers of pills rather than agents in reconstructing meaningful human relationships and life insights...perhaps through some type of Meyerian 'sociopsychobiological' synthesis..." (pp. 18-19).

I believe that there is an as yet imperceptible shift in our psychiatric-neuroscientific models of the human being, which follows the shifts taking place in the other sciences, e.g. post-quantum physics (see A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down by Nobel Laureate Robert Laughlin- 2005 - Basic Books), from reductionism to emergence-complex organizational structures which cannot be reduced to the more basic structural processes which initiated them.

Mike Eigen, psychoanalyst & ISPS member, has published many books which are relevant to the concerns of many ISPS members on this listserve. His new book The Sensitive Self won a 2005 Gradiva Award given by the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. His acceptance remarks are as follows:

I am proud to get this award from NAAP, an organization that has furthered the autonomy of psychoanalysis, protecting it from monopolistic powers. By protecting the autonomy of psychoanalysis, creative people from many areas, humanistic as well as scientific, are enabled to train and contribute. Psychoanalysis provides a home for those with a certain psychic bent, bitten by a psychoanalytic drive, a drive to spend time with strange and rewarding birds of psychic life. NAAP has provided space for the commingling of many odd birds - the schools of depth psychology that add color and dimensionality to the reality of psychic processes.

The Sensitive Self bears witness to this task. It affirms the importance of our sensitive being, We are traumatic subjects and creative subjects. We give testimony to the fact that feelings matter. Politicians may be proud of acting more confident than any human can truly feel and predatory mania may fail to care about the life that supports it. But real people pay the price of psychic inflation. Today, more than ever, evolving as sensitive subjects, learning to live an ethics of sensitivity, plays a crucial role in keeping open the possibility of a more humane life.

Brian Koehler