General psychopathology. Yaspers K.

Karl Yaspers (1883–1969) became famous primarily as a philosopher, one of the founders of existentialism, whose influence was noted by Albert Camu, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt. However, Jaspers was not only a philosopher, but also a psychiatrist, and the result of several years of work in a psychiatric hospital grew out of his doctoral dissertation. Jaspers was deeply not satisfied with the approaches to the study and treatment of mental illnesses that existed in his time, he believed that this branch of medicine is in a deep crisis, and set himself an ambitious task to develop new scientific grounds for psychiatry. In fact, he created the philosophy of psychiatry, developed a new language and a categorical apparatus for describing and classifying mental disorders. The first edition of “General Psychopathology” was published in 1913, when Jaspers was 30 years old; The book became the work of his life, at every reprint he processed and expanded it until 1959, when the 7th edition was published. This is a classic of psychiatric literature, a desktop book of psychiatrists, which, even despite the intensive development of the sciences of the human brain and psyche in recent decades, remains indispensable. The diagnostic criteria adopted today, as well as the classification of mental disorders, are still based on the ideas and methods set forth in this work.