General Psychopathology. From the Formation of Personality to Mass Psychology

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 existing approaches to studying and treating mental illnesses at his time; he believed that this branch of medicine was in a deep crisis and set himself the ambitious task of developing new scientific foundations for psychiatry. In fact, he created a philosophy of psychiatry, developing 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 new edition, he revised and expanded it—up to 1959, when the 7th edition was released. This is a classic of psychiatric literature, a cornerstone book for psychiatrists, which, even despite the intensive development of the sciences of the human brain and psyche in recent decades, remains indispensable. The diagnostic criteria adopted today, as well as the classification of mental disorders, are still based on the ideas and methods presented in this work.