ABSTRACT
To begin with, a few facts. Karl Jaspers’s Allgemeine Psychopathologie (General Psychopathology) was first published in 1913. 1 The author was then barely 30 years of age, working as a physician in the psychiatric hospital at Heidelberg. Two years later he moved away from medicine towards first psychology and then philosophy, the field in which he was to emerge as one of the outstanding figures of the twentieth century. He continued, however, to retain an interest in psychopathology, revising and expanding his book in several later editions. Within the German-speaking world it was at once recognized by leading psychiatrists as a unique achievement, a mountainous landmark in the history of the subject. If Jaspers’s reputation was to decline in Germany between the two world wars, this is attributable chiefly to his outspoken, uncompromising resistance to national socialism. Philosophy for him was a public as well as a private concern, and it was his courageous political stand which led Hannah Arendt to describe him as a contemporary successor of Immanuel Kant.
