Jaspers on Explaining and Understanding in Psychiatry
نویسندگان
چکیده
In one of the later editions of General Psychopathlogy, Karl Jaspers writes that, when the book was first published, his discussion of the distinction between explaining and understanding was " greeted as something radically new, although all I had done was to link psychiatric reality with the traditional humanities " (GP, p. 302). There is not a little tension between the apparent modesty of this remark and the somewhat grandiose picture of the psychiatrist that emerges from some of the other pages of the book, where we learn, for instance, that only " a lifelong study of poets such as Shakespeare, Goethe, the ancient dramatists and such moderns as Dostoevsky, Balzac, etc. " (GP, p. 314) can furnish a person with the kinds of understanding abilities called upon in psychiatry. Related to this tension within the book, there is an optimistic, but also a rather more cynical, take one might have on why the distinction between explaining and understanding, as articulated by Jaspers, came to enjoy a great deal of influence on work in psychiatry. According to the optimistic take, that influence is due to the fact that Jaspers correctly identified a key element of psychiatric practice, and for the first time provided the conceptual resources required to give it a precise theoretical articulation. According to the cynical take, the influence is rather to be seen as a result of the flattering picture Jaspers paints of the psychiatrist as a Renaissance man, whose
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