How and why psychiatry still needs Karl Jaspers: a dialectical account

Abstract

In this paper, I analyze General Psychopathology, the seminal psychopathological work of the philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers, from a dialectical perspective, showing how it can contribute to contemporary psychiatry. Dialectical interpretations of this work are still scarce and generally address the part of the work in which Jaspers makes direct reference to dialectics. Instead, I expose the implicit dialectic by which the overall form of the work is organized. I take the “psychology of meaning” as an example for this dialectical account. I suggest two consequences of this dialectical account of the “psychology of meaning” for psychopathology, which I call intrisec ambiguity and epistemic particularism. Finally, I conclude by pointing out how both notions help shed some epistemological and pragmatic light on the discipline of psychiatry, in a sustained state of crisis.