The absolute bedrock of General Psychopathology is the distinction between two ways of knowing: and Understanding (Verstehen) .
In the context of reading the PDF, this is most evident in his detailed taxonomy of symptoms. Jaspers distinguished between "objective symptoms" (what the doctor sees) and "subjective symptoms" (what the patient feels). He demanded that the patient’s subjective experience—their Erlebnis (lived experience)—be the primary data of psychopathology. This shifted the focus from the "brain disease" to the "person suffering." karl jaspers psicopatologia general pdf