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2 - What Is Psychopathology?

Controversies in Classifying Psychiatric Disorder

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 January 2024

Patricia Casey
Affiliation:
University College Dublin
Brendan Kelly
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Dublin
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Summary

Karl Jaspers, a psychiatrist, theologian and philosopher, is the father of psychopathology. His work General Psychopathology (translated 2013) is a classic in the psychiatric literature. He believed that mental illness, in particular psychosis, should be evaluated with regard to the abnormal phenomena that are present – for example, hallucination, delusions, thought disorder – rather than to their content. The latter (content) was the focus of the psychoanalytic school who argued that content was a clue to underlying traumas and issues that may have contributed to the person’s current state. So whether the content of a delusion was persecutory or guilt-laden, Jaspers believed, was less important than the presence per se of the delusion. Thus, he was distinguishing between form (primary or secondary, systematised or non-systematised, etc.) and content (e.g., persecutory, guilt and nihilistic).

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Chapter
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Fish's Clinical Psychopathology
Signs and Symptoms in Psychiatry
, pp. 11 - 23
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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