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

The first part of the reissue of the classic work of Karl Jaspers, who laid the methodological foundations of modern psychiatry, in the book «General Psychopathology. From the Foundations of Psychopathology to the Formation of Personality».
In the work «From the Foundations of Psychopathology to the Formation of Personality», the author distinguishes between the subjective experiences of the patient and the objective manifestations of the illness, as well as introduces a key distinction between causal explanation and meaningful understanding of mental phenomena. Analyzing the nature of hallucinations, delusions, obsessive states, and disturbances of consciousness, Jaspers offers the concept of «understanding psychology» — a tool for grasping the internal connections between experiences and actions of a person. The book is based on rich clinical material and retains value as a guide to understanding mental disorders.
This is not a dry reference book of symptoms, but a guide to thinking — for those who want not just to diagnose, but to truly understand people who have faced mental suffering.


• A convenient reissue of a monumental work in two volumes in the series «Non-Fiction. Big Books»: white paper, excellent typography, hardcover decorated with gold foil. Previously, the book was published in one volume in the series.
• The foundation of modern diagnostic criteria still relies on the methodological framework established in this work. It is a working tool that retains practical significance.
• Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) is primarily renowned as a philosopher, one of the founders of existentialism, whose influence was noted by Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, and other authors. However, Jaspers was not only a philosopher but also a physician-psychiatrist, and his doctoral dissertation «General Psychopathology» was 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 illnesses that existed in his time; he believed that this field 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, developed a new language and categorical apparatus for describing and classifying mental disorders.

The book «General Psychopathology. From the Foundations of Psychopathology to the Formation of Personality» is a fundamental tool and bedside book for psychiatrists, which, even despite the intensive development of the sciences of the human brain and psyche in recent decades, remains irreplaceable. Thanks to its excellent series design, it will serve for a long time and is an excellent choice as a gift for those studying psychiatry, psychotherapy, and mental disorders, students and professionals who collect non-fiction literature and such psychology books as «The Psychopathology of Everyday Life» by Sigmund Freud, «Mental Illness and Psychology» and «History of Madness in the Classical Age» by Michel Foucault, as well as «The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat» by Oliver Sacks.