General Psychopathology. From the Foundations of Psychopathology to the Formation of Personality

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) became famous primarily as a philosopher, one of the founders of existentialism, whose influence was noted by Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Hannah Arendt. However, Jaspers was not only a philosopher but also a physician-psychiatrist, and his doctoral dissertation "General Psychopathology" is the result of several years of work in a psychiatric hospital. Jaspers was deeply dissatisfied with the approaches to the study and treatment of mental illness existing at his time; he believed that this branch of medicine was in deep crisis and set himself the ambitious task of developing new scientific foundations for psychiatry. In fact, he created a philosophy of psychiatry, developed a new language and categorical apparatus for describing and classifying mental disorders. The first edition of "General Psychopathology" was published in 1913 when Jaspers was 30 years old; the book became the work of his life, and with each reissue, he revised and expanded it—up until 1959 when the 7th edition was published. This is a classic of psychiatric literature, a manual for psychiatrists that, even despite the intensive development of the sciences of the human brain and psyche in recent decades, remains indispensable. Today’s diagnostic criteria, as well as the classification of mental disorders, are still based on the ideas and methods outlined in this work.