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This half-century-old magnum opus, the work of a man who has achieved eminence in two difficult fields, psychiatry and philosophy, has not been available to those of us who do not read German. The University of Chicago Press deserves credit for publishing a very good English translation.
Until 1945 Jaspers was a prominent member of the Heidelberg school, and thereafter he taught philosophy at the University of Basel until his recent retirement. The book, as germane today as the day it was written, is divided into six parts: causal connections of psychic life, conception of psychic life as a whole, abnormal psyche in society and history, and finally, the human being as a whole, which includes an Appendix dealing with an examination of the whole patient.
The essence of the book concerns the so-called “boundary situation,” that area of our knowledge about which we know the least, where dialectical and semantic difficulties make it impossible to set clear guidelines. It is in these situations that illogicalities and specious reasoning can confound the researcher and lead the psychiatrist into dead ends. The book attempts to set out methods of thinking and critical examination into any aspect of human behavior by means of logic and philosophy. Jaspers permeates his system with his principles of existential thought, and shows how knowledge can be synthesized in such a manner as to delineate carefully the known from the surmised, and the possible-to-be-known from the impossible-of-knowledge.
Great stress is laid on those aspects of man and his strivings which move toward self-realization; the holistic viewpoint is preferred over any other. Systems which do not deal with people in an open-ended manner, such as those of Freud and Jung, come in for considerable criticism, especially their ad hoc reasoning, theorizing and dogmatizing. Closed-end thinking leads to cultism. For those who wish to construct their own personalized systems of therapy, the book is invaluable in showing