Conceptual Impasses in Developing a Coherent Philosophy of Psychiatry

This issue of the AAPP Bulletin marks two firsts for the organization, neither fully desirable, but both born of necessity. As is immediately obvious, this is the first Bulletin that is arriving via Internet rather than as the traditional hardcopy that appears in your mailbox and has a material heft and texture to it. For those of us born in the pencil and paper era, or even in the typewriter era, the irrepressible convenience of electronic communication in all forms has taken a period of adjustment, but the battle, if ever there was much of one, is well over. It was only twenty years ago that I collaborated, with Sir Martin Roth, on my first book. Literally written by hand, with great secretarial and typing and correcting support every day at the university, Roth and I airmailed our sequential copies back and forth across the Atlantic, occasionally speaking via telephone (an innovation once) and meeting in person twice to work out a final draft. This method, which had its virtues, is as obsolete as the horse and buggy or clipper ship. Nevertheless, there is still a certain nostalgia is giving up old and familiar ways. On the positive side, the electronic Bulletin does not have a page or length limitation, can afford more extended discussions of rich topics, and will arrive at your doorstep, so to speak, almost instantly once the human factor of writing, editing, and graphic design is painstakingly completed. These benefits are made real in the interesting commentaries in this issue by Christian Perring, Jim Phillips, Mark Rego, Phil Sinaikin, Scott Waterman & Robert Schwartz, and Mel Woody, with a response by Ken Kendler, of Kendler’s provocative article in the American Journal of Psychiatry on reductionistic and pluralistic models of the mind/ body problem. The necessity aspect of switching to electronic publishing of the Bulletin shifts us directly into the second “first” for AAPP. As you all know by now, AAPP has launched a modest (but ambitious for us) funding-raising (capital campaign) drive. The immediate connection has been that, other than costs related to the annual May meetings, printing and distributing the Bulletin has been the largest expense in our budget. The intent of the capital campaign is to free us of the yearly crisis of whether we will have enough funds for the annual meeting. The longer-term goal is to begin to establish a more secure fiscal basis for the mission and future of AAPP, an organization that provides a common meeting ground for the interface of philosophy and psychiatry, broadly speaking. We would all be the intellectually poorer without AAPP, so I appeal to you to let yourselves be a trifle bit fiscally poorer by responding richly to John Sadler’s letter that arrived last month, and even thinking about future informal donations as small pieces of money might come your way. If only 250 individuals (or families) were each to contribute $100 to this campaign, we would achieve a modest goal of $25,000, enough to keep us out of trouble for a number of years. Of course, some can and will give more, and some can and will give less: I offer the arithmetic just to point out how relatively easy it can be to reach modest goals. With a thank you in advance on behalf of AAPP, I wish you all a healthy and productive 2006.