Precision medicine and molecular systems medicine (MSM) are highly utilized and successful approaches to improve understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of many diseases from bench-to-bedside. Especially in the COVID-19 pandemic, molecular techniques and biotechnological innovation have proven to be of utmost importance for rapid developments in disease diagnostics and treatment, including DNA and RNA sequencing technology, treatment with drugs and natural products and vaccine development. The COVID-19 crisis, however, has also demonstrated the need for systemic thinking and transdisciplinarity and the limits (...) of MSM: the neglect of the bio-psycho-social systemic nature of humans and their context as the object of individual therapeutic and population-oriented interventions. COVID-19 illustrates how a medical problem requires a transdisciplinary approach in epidemiology, pathology, internal medicine, public health, environmental medicine, and socio-economic modeling. Regarding the need for conceptual integration of these different kinds of knowledge we suggest the application of general system theory (GST). This approach endorses an organism-centered view on health and disease, which according to Ludwig von Bertalanffy who was the founder of GST, we call Organismal Systems Medicine (OSM). We argue that systems science offers wider applications in the field of pathology and can contribute to an integrative systems medicine by (i) integration of evidence across functional and structural differentially scaled subsystems, (ii) conceptualization of complex multilevel systems, and (iii) suggesting mechanisms and non-linear relationships underlying the observed phenomena. We underline these points with a proposal on multi-level systems pathology including neurophysiology, endocrinology, immune system, genetics, and general metabolism. An integration of these areas is necessary to understand excess mortality rates and polypharmacological treatments. In the pandemic era this multi-level systems pathology is most important to assess potential vaccines, their effectiveness, short-, and long-time adverse effects. We further argue that these conceptual frameworks are not only valid in the COVID-19 era but also important to be integrated in a medicinal curriculum. (shrink)

In the 1930s C. G. Jung embarked upon a bold investigation into childhood dreams as remembered by adults to better understand their significance to the lives of the dreamers. Jung presented his findings in a four-year seminar series at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Children's Dreams marks their first publication in English, and fills a critical gap in Jung's collected works. Here we witness Jung the clinician more vividly than ever before--and he is witty, impatient, sometimes authoritarian, (...) always wise and intellectually daring, but also a teacher who, though brilliant, could be vulnerable, uncertain, and humbled by life's great mysteries. These seminars represent the most penetrating account of Jung's insights into children's dreams and the psychology of childhood. At the same time they offer the best example of group supervision by Jung, presenting his most detailed and thorough exposition of Jungian dream analysis and providing a picture of how he taught others to interpret dreams. Presented here in an inspired English translation commissioned by the Philemon Foundation, these seminars reveal Jung as an impassioned educator in dialogue with his students and developing the practice of analytical psychology. An invaluable document of perhaps the most important psychologist of the twentieth century at work, this splendid volume is the fullest representation of Jung's views on the interpretation of children's dreams, and signals a new wave in the publication of Jung's collected works as well as a renaissance in contemporary Jung studies. (shrink)

(2005). Hermann Cohen and the Renewal of Kantian philosophy2. Angelaki: Vol. 10, continental philosophy and the sciences the german traditionissue editor: damian veal, pp. 95-108.