Psychiatry and philosophy : the epistemological roots of Karl Jaspers’ Allgemeine Psychopathologie

Publisher: FedOA - Federico II University Press 

Series: School of Human and Social Sciences. Working Papers

Pages: 453

Language: Italian

NBN: http://nbn.depositolegale.it/resolver.pl?nbn=urn:nbn:it:unina-30576

Abstract: This work traces and reconstructs the epistemological roots of Karl Jaspers’ Allgemeine Psychopathologie (1913), emphasising its original and innovative character and contextualising it within the scientific and historical-psychiatric debate of the time, with particular attention to the significant interactions that can be discerned between psychiatric themes and philosophical arguments as early as the first edition (and more explicitly from the fourth, of 1946). Such interactions can already be grasped, moreover, in the complex process of Jaspers' psychopathological training, particularly when looking at his apprenticeship at the psychiatric clinic in Heidelberg and his interaction with the main psychiatric ‘sources’ of the more recent German tradition, especially Wilhelm Griesinger and Emil Kraepelin.

Jaspers, convinced of the substantial irreducibility of the individual to any form of rigorous objectification, criticises the organicist orientation of the psychiatry of the time: the psychic dimension constitutes an experience that, as such, possesses qualitative connotations that can never be fully ascribed to simple physiological alterations. Hence, the need to place the scientific explanation of psychic processes within a much broader and more articulate understanding of the subject: Jaspers proposes and sustains, in fact, a methodological pluralism capable of combining the empirical-descriptive method of Erklären (proper to Naturwissenschaften) and the phenomenological-immedesimative method of Verstehen (referable, instead, to Geisteswissenschaften), so as to make possible a more adequate understanding of subjectivity and, at the same time, a no less important protection of the constitutive individual specificity. Only a fruitful interaction between the natural sciences and the sciences of the spirit, between psychiatry and philosophy, makes it possible, in fact, to grasp psychic life in all its complexity and peculiarity.