Promotional Information

As long as psychiatric diagnosis and treatment rest on psychopathological investigation, the continuing improvement and sharpening of this tool of investigation must remain a prime concern to psychiatrists. This book is a guide to that technique; still irreplaceable, much of it is still as fresh as the day it was written and still a lively stimulus to others yet to come. -- E. W. Anderson, foreword to the 1963 English translation of General Psychopathology

Table of Contents

Volume 2
Part III. The Casual Connections of Psychic Life
Chapter 9. Effects of Environment and of the Body on Psychic Life
Chapter 10. Heredity
Chapter 11. The Explanatory Theories—Their Meaning and Value
Part IV. The Conception of the Psychic Life as a Whole
Chapter 12. The Synthesis of Disease Entities
Chapter 13. The Human Species
Chapter 14. Biographical Study
Part V. The Abnormal Psyche in Society and History
(Social and historical aspects of the psychoses and the personality-disorder)
Part VI. The Human Being as a Whole
Appendix
1. Examination of patients
2. The funstion of therapy
3. Prognosis
4. The history of psychopathology as a science
Name Index
General Index

About the Author

Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), a founder of existentialism, studied law and medicine at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and received his M.D. in 1909. He taught psychiatry and philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, and philosophy at the University of Basel in Switzerland. His books include Psychology of World Views, and Philosophy.

Reviews

Karl Jaspers was only thirty when he amassed the data and expounded the methods and interpretations that give his Psychopathologie a place at the side of James' monumental Principles of Psychology. Like James, he later turned to philosophy. He certainly shared James' radically empirical spirit; he documented more systematically the challenge to the methodological imperialism to which psychopathology was subject in his day. -- Peter A. Bertocci Review of Metaphysics