Jaspers on understanding and explanation

Jaspers worked at a time in the development of psychiatry very similar to our own in that there were dramatic advances in the neurosciences of the day: the period became known as psychiatry’s first biological phase. For example, Jaspers’ Heidelberg professor in Heidelberg Franz Nissl showed that the neurohistological changes in general paralysis were different to the changes described by Alois Alzheimer in dementia. General paralysis which had swept Europe after the wars of the late 19th century was discovered to be a form of neurosyphylis. Psychiatry was dominated by academic neuroscientists who favoured a natural scientific model, epitomised by the German psychiatrist Wilhelm Griesinger’s famous aphorism ‘Mental illnesses are brain illnesses’ [Jaspers 1997: 459]. Whilst Jaspers shared the general natural scientific optimism, he believed the underlying biological approach had been pushed too far. ‘These anatomical constructions, however, became quite fantastic (eg. Meynert, Wernicke) and have rightly been called “Brain Mythologies”’ [Jaspers 1997: 18].

Jaspers’ reservations about an emphasis on a natural-scientific approach to psychiatry were driven by his understanding of the philosophical debates about psychology in the late nineteenth century, the so-called Methodenstreit. This concerned whether the human sciences (the Geisteswissenschaften) should try to emulate their far more successful cousins the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften), or whether they should go their own methodological way. ‘Positivists’, including John Stuart Mill, in England and both Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim in France, argued that the human sciences were no different from the natural sciences. Others argued that the human or cultural sciences were different from the natural sciences either in terms of the nature of their subject matter or their methodology or both. The latter, in Germany, included Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Dilthey and Wilhelm Windelband. Crucially for Jaspers the German philosopher and sociologist Max Weber was among the latter camp. Although Weber believed that the human sciences involved a distinctive approach, he believed that sociology, his own discipline, was a hybrid subject, living partly within the natural and partly within the human sciences.

Jaspers regarded psychopathology as Weber regarded sociology. It lay both within the natural sciences, pursuing abnormalities of brain functioning, but also within the human sciences, pursuing the experiences, aims, intentions and subjective meanings of its patients. Since psychiatry was dominated by the ‘brain mythologists’, Jaspers’ major aim was to bring psychiatry back within the ambit of the human sciences. He wanted to balance things up.

Jaspers thus emphasised the importance of understanding, by contrast with explanation, in two important papers (see below).

This session will examine the difference Jaspers considered between understanding and explanation, subjective and objective symptoms and the complementarity of phenomenology and empathy.

The slides are here.

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Further reading

Jaspers, K. ([1912] 1968) ‘The phenomenological approach in psychopathology’ British Journal of Psychiatry 114: 1313-1323

Jaspers, K. ([1913] 1974) ‘Causal and “Meaningful” Connections between Life History and Psychosis’, trans. by J.Hoenig, in S.R.Hirsch and M.Shepherd. in Hirsch, S.R., and M. Shepherd, Themes and Variations in European Psychiatry, Bristol: Wright: 80-93

Thornton, T. (2007) Essential Philosophy of Psychiatry. Oxford: Oxford University Press