In his General Psychopathology, Karl Jaspers identifies two stages in the genesis of delusions in schizophrenia. The first is a set of primary subjective experiences, which he encompasses under the rubric of “delusional atmosphere,”1 building upon F.W. Hagen’s construct of “delusional mood.”2 The second is the patient’s “working through” those experiences, sometimes “calling for the full streng...

(*) Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies, Universität Heidelberg [email protected] (**) Cluster of Excellence «Asia and Europe in a Global Context», Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies, Universität Heidelberg, [email protected] (***) Institute of Egyptology, Universität Heidelberg [email protected]...

Emil Kraepelin's nosology has been reinvented, for better or worse. In the United States, the rise of the neo-Kraepelinian nosology of DSM-III resuscitated Kraepelin's work but also differed from many of his ideas, especially his overtly biological ontology. This neo-Kraepelinian system has led to concerns regarding overdiagnosis of psychiatric syndromes ("nosologomania") and perhaps scientific...

Forgetting history, which frequently repeats itself, is a mistake. In General Psychopathology, Jaspers criticised early 20th century psychiatrists, including those who thought psychiatry was only neurology (Wernicke) or only abnormal psychology (Freud), or who did not see the limitations of the medical model in psychiatry (Kraepelin). Jaspers proposed that some psychiatric disorders follow the ...

After a hundred-years of its publication, the Karl Jaspers' book, General Psychopathology, is still an indispensable book to psychiatrists and for all those who study psychopathology. It's a clear delineation of the phenomenological method for describing the symptoms of mental disorders that remains unmatched until nowadays. The book focuses on the relevance of phenomenological and hermeneutica...

Forgetting history, which frequently repeats itself, is a mistake. In General Psychopathology, Jaspers criticised early 20th century psychiatrists, including those who thought psychiatry was only neurology (Wernicke) or only abnormal psychology (Freud), or who did not see the limitations of the medical model in psychiatry (Kraepelin). Jaspers proposed that some psychiatric disorders follow the ...

In one of the later editions of General Psychopathlogy, Karl Jaspers writes that, when the book was first published, his discussion of the distinction between explaining and understanding was " greeted as something radically new, although all I had done was to link psychiatric reality with the traditional humanities " (GP, p. 302). There is not a little tension between the apparent modesty of t...