Karl Jaspers began his academic career working as a psychiatrist at the University Clinic of Heidelberg. After a period of transition, he switched to philosophy in the early 1920s. In Europe, Jaspers obtained his widest recognition not only through his publications on philosophical and ethical issues, but also for the different editions of his General Psychopathology (GP). Despite the positive reception of his psychiatric and philosophical contributions in the German-speaking world, some authors suggest that outside of Germany Jaspers is a forgotten psychopathologist. However, in current scientific publications in the field of psychiatry and diagnostic classification, Jaspers is often mentioned as having made important contributions to the development of psychopathology and taxonomy, not only in Germany and France but also in other European and Latin American countries. A hundred years since the publication of GP, some authors like Huber (2002), Bolton (2004), or Ghaemi (2009) have suggested that almost every edition played a seminal role in the development of psychiatry in the last century, being one of the most important attempts to introduce scientific order into psychopathology. Central to GP was Jaspers’ attempt to create a new psychopathological methodology, providing key elements for a better comprehension of the main problems in clinical psychiatry. Jaspers introduced the concept of “comprehensive facts” (sinnhafte Tatbestände), while utilizing denominations like “understandable relations” (verständliche Zusammenhänge) and “objective connections” (objektive Verknüpfung), which suggested that clinical psychiatry should be considered a practical aspect of medical praxis, while psychopathology should be considered an independent, theoretical discipline.

In Germany, GP was first published in 1913, having a great impact and a significant influence on the way in which psychiatrists defined symptoms, facts (Tatbestände), subjective experience, objective manifestation, nosology and diagnosis. The psychopathological model that Jaspers introduced for clinical psychiatry focused mainly on subjective experience, aiming more at the elucidation of the patient’s own inner experiences than at the observation of symptoms or behaviors.

Although Max Weber was the first decisive personal influence and Kant the first philosophical influence on Jaspers work, many authors have suggested that Husserl and Dilthey played just as important a role in influencing his development as a psychopathologist. However, there is little agreement on the extent of Husserl’s influence on Jaspers’ GP. Some evidence supports the notion of a certain influence from Husserl on Jaspers’ ideas. Writing about phenomenology, Jaspers mentions Husserl in his Phenomenological Approach in Psychopathology. In a few passages of the first edition of GP, in Jaspers’ analysis of the disorders of perception, there is also some evidence that suggests that Husserl was very important for the development of his ideas. However, as Berrios (1993) and Figueroa (2008) have pointed out, there are significant differences between Husserl’s concept of phenomenology and Jaspers’ proposal of a “specific method of phenomenological analysis.” Husserl preferred to use the term “phenomenology” in the sense of the “appearance of things” or Wesensschau, which differs from the concept proposed by Jaspers in GP of an “empirical method of inquiry.” It is clear that Jaspers wanted to retain the philosophical concept of “phenomenology,” but not in the Husserlian way. According to Berrios (1993) and Figueroa (2008), Husserl’s phenomenology had no influence on the origins and the development of GP. Since then, several discussions about Jaspers’ and Husserl’s concepts of phenomenology have been published in specialized journals. We ought to mention also that the debates about Jaspers and the influence of Husserl went far beyond the borders of Europe, and that the differences between them may have contributed toward generating the unfortunate confusion of current psychiatry regarding the concepts of nosology, phenomenology and psychopathology.

In the early 1920s, Jaspers made the acquaintance of Martin Heidegger, which played a decisive role in Jaspers’ formation as a philosopher. Despite their differences and, at times, difficult relationship, Heidegger and Jaspers were usually associated with each other as the two founding fathers of existential philosophy in Germany.

International recognition of Jaspers’ GP started with great enthusiasm in France in the late 1920s with the first publication of his work in a foreign language (Jaspers 1923/1928). Jacques Lacan’s thesis “De la psychose paranoique dans ses rapports avec la personnalité” is an example of the excellent reception of GP in France at that time. After the completion of the French translation and during the third and fourth decade of the 20^th century, the first edition of his textbook was translated into the Japanese. After the Second World War, the fourth edition of GP was concluded and a few years later translated into Spanish. This difficult translation task was successfully concluded in 1950 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, while the English translation was published many years later, in 1963 in Manchester (Jaspers 1959/1963). As a result of this atypical evolution of Jaspers dissemination in the western world, the international consideration of his GP started first in France, then in Japan and in Latin America, and only two decades later in the English-speaking world.

The American Psychopathological Association was founded in 1910 and is one of the oldest research organizations in North America. Its primary goal has always been “to stimulate on specific topics relevant to research in psychopathology”. Unfortunately, the initial reception of GP in the U.S. was poor and poorly timed. From the first edition on, acceptance of this new psychopathological approach proposed by Jaspers faced many difficulties in Great Britain and in North America. As a consequence, the first translation of GP into English was completed and published by Hoeing and Anderson in 1963 in Manchester (Jaspers 1959/1963), 50 years after its publication in Germany (Hoeing 2004). According to Havens (1967), Jaspers writings on psychopathology, largely unknown in the U.S., represent the most detailed rationale for eclecticism in psychiatry.

It is interesting to note that in the U.S. Jaspers was successfully introduced by Hannah Arendt in the field of philosophy in the early 1930s, and that after the Second World War his main ideas as a philosopher received progressively more attention and recognition. In 1980, Leonard and Edith Ehrlich founded the Karl Jaspers Society of North America in Boston. Since then, many publications have been associated with Karl Jaspers as a philosopher, but very few have focused on his psychopathological contributions. In fact, Jaspers’ psychiatric work remained ignored for decades in most places in the U.S. Only a few authors from the East Coast, like Leston Havens, Paul McHugh and Philip Slavney, have paid attention to his ideas. The majority of the U.S. psychiatrists, however, showed no interest in Jaspers’ GP. Havens published in 1967 an interesting article in the American Journal of Psychiatry about Karl Jaspers and American psychiatry (Havens 1967). In his paper, Havens agrees that Jaspers greatly influenced the development of phenomenology, the concept of process and existential analysis. The author reviews the growth of Jaspers’ thought out of Emil Kraepelin’s and its relation to the psychiatry of content, ego psychology and various psychotherapies. Paul McHugh and Phillip Slavney (1998), from Johns Hopkins, published in 1983 The Perspectives of Psychiatry, an excellent textbook for psychiatrists during their time of residency. In 1997, McHugh included his own foreword to the English edition of GP. According to McHugh (2006) Jaspers’ “phenomenological method hinges on the human capacity for self-expression—a means of communicating one’s experiences to another. This capacity makes it possible for patients to describe the content of their minds and for psychiatrists listening to these descriptions to enter the mental life of such patients.” For over three decades, McHugh’s and Slavney’s textbook was used to teach Johns Hopkins medical students and residents how to formulate and treat patients with psychiatric disorders. However, most of the academic centers of the U.S. showed little or no interest for the proposals of McHugh and Slavney with regard to Jaspers’ GP. For instance, the fourth edition of the U.S.’s mainly used textbook, the Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, edited by Kaplan and Sadock (1985), does not mention GP at all. The poor reception of the English translation of GP in the U.S. was probably due to different factors, including its late publication in comparison with the French and Spanish translations of 1934 and 1950. What other factors may explain this lackluster reception?

Some authors have tried to explain this poor reception by referencing historical, religious and cultural reasons, including the factor of ressentiment against Germany following the Second World War. Despite their differences, Jaspers was very often associated with Heidegger, creating an unwarranted prejudice against him. However, these prejudices are totally unfounded due to the fact that Jaspers was a victim of the National Socialist Regime rather than a supporter, and due to his well-known anti-fascist political ideas before, during and after the war. Other authors believe that the far more limited reception of GP in the U.S. may be associated to the relatively ambivalent position of the famous psychiatrist Adolf Meyer-Gross, who, belonging to the Heidelberg School , introduced GP in the English-speaking countries. According to these authors, Meyer-Gross not only supported Jaspers’ ideas, but also criticized them occasionally (e.g., by pointing out that the concept of “psychological comprehension was too flexible, leading to infinite extensions and to the contention that all psychopathological manifestations might be psychogenic”).

The minimal interest shown by psychiatrists from North America could also be explained via historical-ideological reasons. For more than four decades, nearly all the major leaders in the U.S. field of psychiatry embraced psychodynamic principles, and used them to shape psychiatric education and training. Psychoanalysis tried to explain the majority of psychiatric disturbances, leaving no space for psychopathology. In 1980, the introduction of DSM III and DSM IV shifted psychiatry into a descriptive-operational dimension with a different philosophical background. First psychoanalysis, then the new paradigm of operational and statistical diagnosis, and, finally, the strong influence of the new “bio-psycho-social paradigm” contributed to reduce the complex problem of human psychopathology into a simple list of symptom aggregates or, recalling the words of Kendell, into a “label of arbitrary groupings of clinical phenomena” (Kendell 1984).

According to the former editor of the American Journal of Psychiatry, Nancy Andreasen (2007), this was the end of phenomenology in the U.S. In 2007, Nancy Andreasen writes:

Since the publication of DSM-III in 1980, there has been a steady decline in the teaching of careful clinical evaluation that is targeted to the individual person’s problems and social context and that is enriched by a good general knowledge of psychopathology. Students are taught to memorize DSM rather than to learn complexities from the great psychopathologists of the past. By 2005, the decline has become so severe that it could be referred to as ‘the death of phenomenology in the United States.’

Today we know that, fortunately, psychopathology has not passed away. In the U.S., Michael Schwartz and Osborne Wiggins belong to a growing list of academic psychiatrist’s interested in a renewal of psychopathology and diagnosis. In 1987, Schwartz and Wiggins published an article about “Diagnosis and Ideal Types,” trying to discover new insights for the problem of psychiatric classification. Based on Weber’s concepts, the authors analyze his “ideal types” with the concepts used in modern psychiatric diagnosis. Schwartz and Wiggins propose that, at the outset of the examination, “Weberian ideal types” should be considered in order to provide a better orientation and a reliable method for clinical diagnosis. As a result of this examination method, the psychiatrist should arrive eventually at particular convictions regarding the nature of the patient’s problem. In recent years, Nassir Ghaemi (from the U.S.) has published a list of interesting articles about the work of Karl Jaspers, stressing the need for reintroducing the concepts of “pluralism,” “transcendence,” and “limit situations” as important keys for a better understanding of the psychiatric practice (Ghaemi 2007). In 2009, Ghaemi published an article about DSM and the Jaspers critique of Kraepelin’s taxonomy (Ghaemi 2009). According to this author, in the early 20th century, Karl Jaspers provided unique insights into Kraepelin’s work, introducing the concept of “ideal types” in a different way (Ghaemi 2009).

In 1950, Saubidet and Santillán published the first translation of GP into Spanish in Buenos Aires. The focus of the translators concentrated on the methodological dimension of the text, considering it essential for psychiatric practice. The history of the Spanish translation starts in 1946, after the publication in Germany of the fourth edition of the “GP.” In Europe, this new and refreshing edition had been received with great enthusiasm and was strongly supported by Schneider, López-Ibor, Berner, and Huber, among many other leaders of the European psychiatry.