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 ( Erklarende Psychologie) must be supplemented by an understanding of the "meaning-relations" experienced by human beings ( Verstehende Psychologie).
Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), a founder of existentialism, studied law and medicine at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and received his M.D. in 1909. He taught psychiatry and philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, and philosophy at the University of Basel in Switzerland. His books include Psychology of World Views, and Philosophy.
Volume 2Part III. The Casual Connections of Psychic LifeChapter 9. Effects of Environment and of the Body on Psychic LifeChapter 10. HeredityChapter 11. The Explanatory Theories—Their Meaning and ValuePart IV. The Conception of the Psychic Life as a WholeChapter 12. The Synthesis of Disease EntitiesChapter 13. The Human SpeciesChapter 14. Biographical StudyPart V. The Abnormal Psyche in Society and History (Social and historical aspects of the psychoses and the personality-disorder)Part VI. The Human Being as a WholeAppendix1. Examination of patients2. The funstion of therapy3. Prognosis4. The history of psychopathology as a scienceName IndexGeneral Index
Karl Jaspers was only thirty when he amassed the data and expounded the methods and interpretations that give his Psychopathologie a place at the side of James' monumental Principles of Psychology. Like James, he later turned to philosophy. He certainly shared James' radically empirical spirit; he documented more systematically the challenge to the methodological imperialism to which psychopathology was subject in his day. -- Peter A. Bertocci Review of Metaphysics