ABSTRACT
The subject-matter of this volume develops the map charted by Karl Jaspers in his General Psychopathology, which remains the clearest and most convincing outline of the whole field. 1 Jaspers nowhere provides a clear-cut definition of psychopathology, and points out that its ‘essence… as a study can only emerge from a composite framework’. Inveighing against the futility of’endlessness’, the attempt to establish absolute knowledge through the application of any one scientific discipline, he urges the psychiatrist to ‘acquire some of the viewpoints and methods that belong to the world of the Humanities and Social Studies… since the methods of almost all the Arts and Sciences converge on psychopathology’. With this ambiguous phrase Jaspers indicates the complex nature of a discipline which, in his view, extended the notion of scientific enquiry as it is usually understood.
