After a hundred-years of its publication, the Karl Jaspers' book, General Psychopathology, is still an indispensable book to psychiatrists and for all those who study psychopathology. It's a clear delineation of the phenomenological method for describing the symptoms of mental disorders that remains unmatched until nowadays. The book focuses on the relevance of phenomenological and hermeneutical methods in psychopathology. Although this work is grounded in the clinical thought and practices of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jaspers' delineation of psychiatric methods in this work is still evaluated as unmatched to this day, a work that is indispensable to contemporary psychiatry. Jaspers also contributed with important articles and book reviews to psychiatric periodicals during the first two decades of the twentieth century.
psychopathology; philosophy; history; psychiatry