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Karl Jaspers' Allgemeine Psychopathologie, originally published in 1913, and followed by further editions in 1919, 1923, 1942, and 1959, is now available in an English translation of its seventh and latest version, ably rendered by two members of the University of Manchester, Hoenig and Hamilton.
The publication of this voluminous work is presented to the English-speaking reader through the medium of various prefaces and statements: 'This great psychiatric classic', as the foreword by E. W. Anderson has it, written by an author of 'worldwide eminence as a philosopher' and based on 'painstaking, detailed, and laborious study of facts observed in the individual patient at the conscious level', is contrasted with 'that astonishing lack of criticism, the often unproved and unprovable assertions of the so-called psychodynamic schools'. According to Anderson, most of the present volume is 'still as fresh as the day it was written'.
Jaspers himself is somewhat more circumspect. In his 1959 preface he admits that '… to bring the book up to date on the basis of the research of the last two decades …' has not been possible. Nonetheless, he declares that his book 'does not seem to be out of date', to which may be added the publisher's opinion, that in the Anglo-Saxon countries 'psychiatric teaching and practice have deviated from the main stream of German scientific psychiatry', and