Karl Jaspers’ Allgemeine Psychopathologie: The Theory of Abnormal Perceptions and Its Methodological and Conceptual Basis

In 1913 Karl Jaspers published the first edition of his Allgemeine Psychopathologie. The aim was to overcome the wealth of opinions and single schools of thought prevailing in psychiatry by creating a new systematic order of general psychopathology based on methodological considerations. To illustrate the intellectual horizon and the abundance of the book’s contents, this chapter presents Jaspers’ biographical background and unusual academic career. Phenomenology requires a vivid reproduction deprived of theoretical bias and personal prejudice of mental phenomena present in consciousness. Jaspers contrasted this cross-sectional approach he called “static understanding” with the longitudinal approach of genetic understanding. As a method of gaining insight through understanding, it reveals how mental phenomena evolve out of other mental phenomena. Jaspers assumed that the intrusion of something incomprehensible or the transition of a natural development into an incomprehensible process is accounted for by outer-conscious factors such as a causally explainable disorder. It will be described as a key hypothesis of Allgemeine Psychopathologie. Thanks to the methodology Jaspers created for psychopathology, the book represents the rational foundation of descriptive psychopathology. In addition, the collection of precisely defined and systematically classified symptoms, exemplified by the arsenal of abnormal perceptions, represents excellent tools in neuropsychiatry. It permits the generation of testable hypotheses about the associations between psychopathological phenomena and biological processes.