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Vittorio Gonella has given us an article that deserves wide reading. While written by a novice, it sets a standard of excellence few of us planning our retirements could equal. Not only does Gonella convey the essence of humanism, but he places this effort in the scholarly context of drawing inspiration from a master clinician. He thereby pays homage to Harold Searles and makes clear that a tradition of intensive interpersonal work with severely ill patients will continue for decades. Gonella will become a powerful teacher in his own right; he wants to bring the Other along with him toward a shared experience and understanding.
Another Italian, Giovanni Stanghellini, a faculty member of the Department of Psychiatry, University of Florence, reminds us of the centrality of phenomenology in work with psychosis, a fact that was very clear to psychiatrists even at the beginning of the 20th century. If we look at articles by authors who published in journals such as the American Journal of Insanity a century ago, we find wonderfully colorful case histories and clear and intimate accounts of treatment sessions (Silver, 2002). The authors speculated on psychodynamics, using tools they were discovering from studying Freud's early papers; they approached their work with zest. To keep our own perspective vibrant, we need to revisit the youthful days of our profession and to support the youthful adventures of early career mental health professionals.
Stanghellini's 2004 thesis, grounded in the works of Heidegger, Husserl, Mead, and many others, is that phenomenology is the science of experience. “The fundamental issue addressed by phenomenology is how to approach consciousness (including self-consciousness) …The goal of this close description of the phenomena of consciousness is to find the essential laws of consciousness … phenomenology is methodologically essential for psychopathology, whose endeavour is primarily illuminating the quality of subjective experiences, their person