Karl Jaspers is considered the uncontested founder of psychopathology as a science with its own object and methodology.¹ This establishment of psychopathology was based essentially on the rejection of natural scientific reductionism , which attempted to trace back mental phenomena and occurrences of mental disorders to their source in the organic substrate (i.e., in the brain). Indeed, this reductionism corresponds to the scientific longing for explanations, but it prioritizes the question of why over the question of what and thus neglects the careful describing and understanding of pathological variations of psychic life. Psychopathology as a science by contrast is based for Jaspers on the assumption that even mental abnormalities have gestalt-like and meaningful characteristics and therefore cannot be explained exhaustively by the listing of symptoms, which would be considered reflections of neurobiological disturbances. In contrast to neurology, which correlates single deficiencies with localized physical lesions, psychopathology begins there where both the holistic structure of the mental and, as a result, the constitution of experiencing world and self as a whole suffers from a disturbance. This modified or disturbed constitution cannot be described any longer by reference to individual symptoms, but rather requires a phenomenological presentation of the whole structure of the experienced world. Only if this task is accomplished and the mental illness is understood as a modification of the world-constitution can the search commence for disturbances’ causes, whether they are of a physical, a life-historical, or other sort—namely, by working out from a methodologically secured foundation.

Psychopathology in the 19th Century, by which Jaspers felt confronted, was marked by a dispute between those advocating a “psychic approach” (“Psychiker”) and those advocating a “somatic approach” (“Somatiker”) . The former, above all J. C. A. Heinroth and K. Ideler, sought the causes of mental illnesses in an “aberration” (“Verirrung”) of the psyche itself; often this aberration was interpreted according to moral or even religious perspectives. The latter, on the other hand, amongst them M. Jacobi, F. Nasse, and J. B. Friedreich, denied the possibility that the psyche or the mind itself could fall ill, and they attributed mental illness to physical effects.² Thus, both schools of thought failed to conceive of the state of being mentally ill in direct accordance with its own structures—namely, through trying to realize the patient’s experience or behavior. Instead, they viewed it solely as a symptom of mental or somatic causes. By doing so, both groups overlooked equally the phenomenological dimension.

Already in the introduction to General Psychopathology,³ Jaspers takes a stance against the “somatic approach” of his time, namely, against reducing everything to the brain’s physiology: “The principle of this book is to present a psychopathology which, in its concept-building, its methods of investigation and general outlook, is not enslaved to neurology and medicine on the dogmatic grounds that ‘psychic disorder is cerebral disorder’” (GP, p. 4). This dogma, which Wilhelm Griesinger (1861) formulated in 1861, leads psychiatrists to the conclusion that, “if only we had an exact knowledge of the brain, we would then know the psychic life and its disturbances. This has led psychiatrists to abandon psychopathological studies as unscientific” (GP, p. 459). All validity is attributed “solely to cerebral processes, constitution, physiology and the experiments of objective psychology since these [are] purely physiological, and as far as possible excluded from psychic life” (GP, p. 712).

At the same time, Jaspers’ critique developed just as severe a criticism of the “psychic approach,” namely, of Freudian psychoanalysis in which he perceived a speculative, ideological tendency at work, which went in the direction of unmasking conscious mental experiences as illusions and self-deceptions (cf. GP, pp. 537 ff., 772 ff.). Albeit misjudging the hermeneutic dimension of psychoanalysis and overlooking the possibilities of extended understanding opened up by it, his critique arose from the same impulse, namely, to assert psychopathology and the primary experiencing of the mentally ill as an independent field of phenomenological knowledge. It also arose from the impulse to defend this field against biological as well as psychological reductionism : “We confine description solely to the things that are present to the patients’ consciousness,” in that we “are not concerned at this stage with (…) any subsidiary speculations, fundamental theory or basic postulates” (GP, p. 56). “The psychopathologist, if he is to keep this space free and gain ground for his activities, must set his face against every attempt to create an absolute and to claim that particular methods of research are the only valid, single objectivities, the only true Being as such. He must also take sides on behalf of meaningful understanding in the face of biologism, mechanism, and technics” (GP, p. 770). In Husserl’s sense of “To the things themselves!”, Jaspers asserts that psychopathology must “withdraw” from the secondary, theoretical world of a purportedly recognized true Being and return “to fully present reality” (GP, p. 549).

In accordance with the dominant psychiatric paradigms of his time, Jaspers’ main critique was aimed at biological reductionism. In the following, this confrontation will be examined in more depth; then, its actuality for contemporary psychiatry and neuroscience will be explored.