One Century Of Karl Jaspers General Psychopathology

2013 sees the centenary of Jaspers' foundation of psychopathology as a science with the publication of his magnum opus the Allgemeine Psychopathologie (General Psychopathology), Many of the issues concerning methodology and diagnosis are today the subject of much discussion and debate. This volume brings together leading psychiatrists and philosophers to discuss the impact of this volume, its relevance today, and the legacy it left.

2013 sees the centenary of Jaspers' foundation of psychopathology as a science with the publication of his magnum opus the 'Allgemeine Psychopathologie' ('General Psychopathology'). Many of the issues concerning methodology and diagnosis are today the subject of much discussion and debate. This volume brings together leading psychiatrists and philosophers to discuss the impact of this volume, its relevance today, and the legacy it left.

This book is based on a congress evaluating Jaspers' basic psychopathological concepts and their anthropological roots in light of modern research paradigms. It provides a definition of delusion, his concept of "limit situation" so much challenged by trauma research, and his methodological debate. We are approaching the anniversary of Jaspers seminal work General Psychopathology in 1913. The Centre of Psychosocial Medicine of the University with its Psychiatric Hospital where Jaspers wrote this influential volume as a 29 year old clinical assistant hosted a number of international experts familiar with his psychiatric and philosophical work. This fruitful interdisciplinary discussion seems particularly important in light of the renewed interest in Jaspers’ work, which will presumably increase towards the anniversary year 2013. This volume is unique in bringing together the knowledge of leading international scholars and combining three dimensions of investigation that are necessary to understand Jaspers in light of contemporary questions: history (section I), methodology (section II) and application (section III).

In his most important contribution to the Heidelberg school, a founder of existentialism critiques the scientific aspirations of psychotherapy. In 1910, Karl Jaspers wrote a seminal essay on morbid jealousy in which he laid the foundation for the psychopathological phenomenology that through his work and the work of Hans Gruhle and Kurt Schneider, among others, would become the hallmark of the Heidelberg school of psychiatry. In General Psychopathology, his most important contribution to the Heidelberg school, Jaspers critiques the scientific aspirations of psychotherapy, arguing that in the realm of the human, the explanation of behavior through the observation of regularity and patterns in it (Erklärende Psychologie) must be supplemented by an understanding of the "meaning-relations" experienced by human beings (Verstehende Psychologie).

2013 sees the centenary of Jaspers' foundation of psychopathology as a science in its own right. In 1913 Karl Jaspers published his psychiatric opus magnum - the Allgemeine Psychopathologie (General Psychopathology). Jaspers was working at a time much like our own - with rapid expansion in the neurosciences, and responding to the philosophical challenges that this raised. The idea inspiring his book was very simple: to bring order into the chaos of abnormal psychic phenomena by rigorous description, definition and classification, and to empower psychiatry with a valid and reliable method to assess and make sense of abnormal human subjectivity. After almost one century, many of the concepts challenged by Jaspers are still at issue, and Jaspers' investigation is even now the ground for analyses and discussions. With a new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) imminent, many of the issues concerning methodology and diagnosis are still the subject of much discussion and debate. This volume brings together leading psychiatrists and philosophers to discuss and evaluate the impact of this volume, its relevance today, and the legacy it left. "Jaspers' General Psychopathology is not an easy text to read. Especially nowadays, in the Internet era, it may appear in several parts obscure, convoluted, or repetitive. This is why the present volume has the potential to be not only attractive to scholars, but also extremely useful for young psychiatrists and busy clinicians. It may represent for them a 'guide' to the reading of that ponderous text, helping them to extract the key messages that are likely to resonate with, and at the same time enrich, their clinical practice and theoretical reflection." - From the Introduction by Mario Maj

One century ago, Karl Jaspers published the first edition of his General Psychopathology which may be considered the most comprehensive account of psychopathology with a lasting influence on the development of psychiatry to date. Methodological and clinical issues such as understanding and incomprehensibility, defining delusions, or self-awareness and its disorders are the core matter of 21st century psychopathology. The renaissance of the philosophy of psychiatry at the turn of the century has lent new strength to Jaspers' project of founding psychiatry on psychopathology. This special issue highlights some of his central concepts from the point of view of modern research in philosophy, psychiatry, and neuroscience with a special focus on methodological questions such as multiperspectivity, understanding and empathy, the psychopathology of schizophrenia, and existential concepts of mental illness and psychotherapy. This edition is of immediate interest for psychiatrists, psychologists, and philosophers who want to know how Jaspers' opus magnum is seen from the point of view of modern philosophy, psychiatry, and neuroscience.

Karl Jaspers is one of the least understood and most neglected major philosophers of the twentieth century, and yet his ideas, particularly those concerned with death, have immense contemporary relevance.Filiz Peach provides a clear explanation of Jaspers' philosophy of existence, clarifying and reassessing the concept of death that is central to his thought. For Jaspers, a human being is not merely a physical entity but a being with a transcendent aspect and so, in some sense 'deathless'. Peach explores this transcendent aspect of humanity and what it is to be 'deathless' in Jaspersian terms.This book is a major contribution to the scarce literature on Jaspers and will be valuable to student and academic alike.

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) was a German psychiatrist and philosopher and one of the most original European thinkers of the twentieth century. As a major exponent of existentialism in Germany, he had a strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry and philosophy. He was Hannah Arendt’s supervisor before her emigration to the United States in the 1930s and himself experienced the consequences of Nazi persecution. He was removed from his position at the University of Heidelberg in 1937, due to his wife being Jewish. Published in 1949, the year in which the Federal Republic of Germany was founded, The Origin and Goal of History is a vitally important book. It is renowned for Jaspers' theory of an 'Axial Age', running from the 8th to the 3rd century BCE. Jaspers argues that this period witnessed a remarkable flowering of new ways of thinking that appeared in Persia, India, China and the Greco-Roman world, in striking parallel development but without any obvious direct cultural contact between them. Jaspers identifies key thinkers from this age, including Confucius, Buddha, Zarathustra, Homer and Plato, who had a profound influence on the trajectory of future philosophies and religions. For Jaspers, crucially, it is here that we see the flowering of diverse philosophical beliefs such as scepticism, materialism, sophism, nihilism, and debates about good and evil, which taken together demonstrate human beings' shared ability to engage with universal, humanistic questions as opposed to those mired in nationality or authoritarianism. At a deeper level, The Origin and Goal of History provides a crucial philosophical framework for the liberal renewal of German intellectual life after 1945, and indeed of European intellectual life more widely, as a shattered continent attempted to find answers to what had happened in the preceding years. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Foreword by Christopher Thornhill.