Abstract
Karl Jaspers is credited to have imported phenomenology into psychiatry. However, more than a phenomenological stance, his “Allgemeine Psychopathologie” introduced within psychiatry a methodological post-Kantian view. Its core was the distinction between explanation and understanding (“Verstehen”) and the psychological inquiry into human lived experience, opened by this last concept. Although in the following years psychological hermeneutics became synonymous of psychoanalytic interpretation, it is the “verstehende Psychopathologie” that best epitomizes the hermeneutic tradition derived from Schleiermacher. This chapter will deal with the developmental pathway from late nineteenth-century ideas about the human disciplines to Jaspers and Weber’s “verstehende” approach.
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Aragona, M. (2020). At the Origins of Hermeneutic Psychopathology. In: Marková, I.S., Chen, E. (eds) Rethinking Psychopathology. Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43439-7_13
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