Jaspers, phenomenology, and the ‘ontological difference’

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis A. Sass
Keyword(s):  
General Position ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Ontological Difference ◽  
Karl Jaspers ◽  
General Psychopathology ◽  
Explanatory Relevance

This paper considers Karl Jaspers’ general position regarding human experience and the study thereof—as expressed in “The Phenomenological Approach in Psychopathology” (1912) and General Psychopathology (first published 1913). After describing Jaspers’ rejection of epistemological objectivism and physicalism, I consider later developments in hermeneutic phenomenology that are absent from his discussion. These include criticism of the “prejudice against prejudices” and also of what Heidegger termed the “forgetting of the ontological difference” (namely, neglect of general qualities of the experiential world and its presencing, in favour of focusing on entity-like phenomena that occur ‘within’ the horizons of this awareness). Jaspers presents phenomenology as a form of pure description, devoid of explanatory relevance, that offers “unprejudiced direct grasp of [experiential] events as they really are.” From a contemporary, hermeneutic standpoint, Jaspers’ vision seems overly modest regarding what phenomenology can offer to psychopathology, yet overly confident about the precision and certitude of the accounts it might provide.

Jaspers, Karl (1883−1969)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Medical School ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Psychiatric Clinic ◽  
Karl Jaspers ◽  
General Psychopathology ◽  
Epistemological Foundation

Karl Jaspers was a German psychiatrist and existential philosopher. After graduating from medical school in 1908, Jaspers took up a research position in a psychiatric clinic in Heidelberg but soon became dissatisfied with both the theory and practice of contemporary psychiatry. The result was the landmark two-volume General Psychopathology (1913), which attempted to provide psychiatry with a systematic epistemological foundation.

scholarly journals The mental state examination

2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 97-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Huline-Dickens
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Karl Jaspers ◽  
General Psychopathology ◽  
Seminal Work ◽  
State Examination

SummaryThe mental state examination is unlike any other assessment in medicine. Karl Jaspers is largely attributed with describing the structure and method of its use. In the centenary year of Jaspers' seminal work General Psychopathology, psychiatry can celebrate the mental state examination as part of its rational and secular heritage.

Jaspers’ ‘Critique of Psychoanalysis’: between past and future

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario Rossi Monti
Keyword(s):  
Historical Context ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Karl Jaspers ◽  
General Psychopathology ◽  
Critical Thought ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

Karl Jaspers publishes his Critique for psychoanalysis in 1950. This contribution represents the culmination of a journey originated many years before with the publication of General Psychopathology in 1913. In order to better understand the culmination of Jaspers’ journey the Author will take the following points into consideration: the stages that marked the history of Jaspers’ critical thought; the historical context; the tone of his criticism and, finally, its content. The final part of this essay attempts to show how some of Jaspers’ critical observations on psychoanalysis should not be considered as a thing of the past, because they were and still are a fundamental topic of discussion and debate within the Freudian psychoanalytic movement (International Psychoanalytical Association).

Place Matters

2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-151
Author(s):  
Liselotte Hedegaard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Spatial Properties ◽  
The Middle Ages

Abstract This article positions place within a phenomenological framework. Current philosophical inquiry shows little interest in place, yet academic disciplines concerned with spatial properties look to philosophy—and in particular phenomenology—to provide important contributions to overcome the limitations of quantitative methodologies, particularly with respect to sentiments of attachment to and identification with places. Seemingly, however, philosophy offers little support in this field. Place disappears from philosophical investigations during the Middle Ages and is replaced by considerations on space. Keeping the employment of phenomenological approaches in other academic disciplines in mind, this article sets out to explore traces of a re-emerging interest in place among twentieth-century phenomenologists. It proposes a phenomenological approach to place in which there is a shift from regarding place in terms of a where to understanding what a place is in human experience.

Karl Jaspers

2018 ◽  
pp. 95-103
Author(s):  
Matthias Bormuth
Keyword(s):  
Max Weber ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Intellectual Biography ◽  
Georg Simmel ◽  
Karl Jaspers ◽  
General Psychopathology ◽  
Wilhelm Dilthey ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Self Reflection

This chapter discusses the psychopathological ideas of Karl Jaspers, one of the founding fathers of phenomenological thinking. Jaspers always admired researchers who used the means of natural sciences in psychiatry, but he relied more on the psychology of understanding conceptualized and exercised in the humanities (“Geisteswissenschaften”) by Wilhelm Dilthey, Max Weber, and Georg Simmel. The chapter first provides an overview of Jaspers’s intellectual biography as a psychiatrist before analyzing his methodological horizons of understanding psychology. It then examines what philosophical considerations motivated Jaspers to draw the “limits of understanding” closer and stricter in the last edition of his book General Psychopathology, first published in 1913. It suggests that these limits can be determined as an existential application of Immanuel Kant’s idea and antinomy of freedom. The chapter concludes with an assessment of Jaspers’s claim that existence-philosophical self-reflection constitutes a necessary supplement to psychotherapy.

Karl Jaspers: General Psychopathology

1982 ◽  
Vol 141 (3) ◽  
pp. 310-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Shepherd
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Psychiatric Hospital ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Karl Jaspers ◽  
General Psychopathology ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

To begin with, a few facts. Karl Jaspers' 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' 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.

scholarly journals Jaspers’ Phenomenology

Folia Medica ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 373-380 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diogo Telles-Correia ◽  
Sérgio Saraiva ◽  
João Gama Marques
Keyword(s):  
Causal Explanation ◽  
Phenomenological Description ◽  
Phenomenological Method ◽  
Karl Jaspers ◽  
General Psychopathology ◽  
Clinical Methods ◽  
The Mind

Abstract Karl Jaspers published the first edition of ‘General Psychopathology’ in 1913. Now, coinciding with its 100th anniversary whose importance was consecrated through multiple congresses, we see a parallelism and a return to the dilemma of the ‘Methodenstreit’, which led Karl Jaspers to introduce the phenomenological method for psychopathology to understand the subjective manifestations of the mind. Phenomenology is part of the research and clinical methods in psychiatry and psychology as a way to capture the subjective in psychopathology. However, phenomenology is nowadays wrongly used. In this article, we attempt to rediscover and present in a clear way the origins and meaning of Jaspers’ phenomenology, whose bases, although forgotten, remain current. This will be done by revising its fundamental concepts such as objective and subjective manifestations, understanding and its four types, causal explanation, empathy, intuition, presuppositions and preconceptions, phenomenological description and comprehensive ‘seeing’.

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