Jaspers’ Critique of Reductionism from a Current Perspective

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