General Psychopathology. From the Formation of Personality to the Psychology of Masses

The second part of the reissue of the classical work by Karl Jaspers, which established the methodological foundations of modern psychiatry, in the book «General Psychopathology. From the Formation of Personality to the Psychology of Masses».
«General Psychopathology. From the Formation of Personality to the Psychology of Masses» by Karl Jaspers is a profound study of mental disorders that goes beyond simple classification of symptoms.

The author examines how heredity and environment, bodily and social factors influence a person's psyche. He critically assesses traditional approaches in psychology and introduces his own concepts — eidology and biographism. Jaspers shows the difference between psychologically understandable processes (for example, personality formation) and diseases with unclear development mechanisms (schizophrenia, epilepsy). He also touches upon the social aspects of psychoses and how the understanding of madness has changed over time.
This is not just a compilation of knowledge about heredity or a classification of symptoms, but a deep methodological study of how we can understand personality in its biological, historical, and existential integrity.


• A convenient reissue of the monumental work in two volumes in the series «Non-Fiction. Big Books»: white paper, excellent printing quality, hardcover decorated with gold foil. Previously, within the series, the book was released in one volume.
• The foundation of modern diagnostic criteria still relies on the methodological basis laid out in this work. It is a working tool that retains practical significance.
• 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, Hannah Arendt, and other authors. 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 the study and treatment of mental illnesses in his time, believing 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, developed a new language and categorical apparatus for describing and classifying mental disorders.

The book «General Psychopathology. From the Formation of Personality to the Psychology of Masses» is a fundamental tool and a reference book for psychiatrists, which, despite the intense development of the sciences of the human brain and psyche in recent decades, remains indispensable. With its excellent series design, it will last long and make a great gift book for those studying psychiatry, psychotherapy, and mental disorders, students and specialists 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 Era» by Michel Foucault, as well as «The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat» by Oliver Sacks.