This book celebrates 100 years of Jaspers’ General Psychopathology. It is rich in ideas and demonstrates that Jaspers’ book is still relevant to contemporary psychiatry. But, perhaps even more significantly, it proves that Jaspers’ text is a vast, potentially inexhaustible reservoir of ideas that bears re-reading and allows for continuing criticism. And, that the concepts therein are serviceable, readily adaptable and stimulating of further thought.

The editors set out in the introduction what psychopathology is not, emphasising that it is not mental pathology, not nosology, not nosography and definitely not a specialty within psychiatry. By their account, psychopathology has at least three roles in psychiatry, namely development of a common language, provision of the basic ground for diagnosis and classification, and making an indispensible contribution to the intelligibility of abnormal experience based on subjective meanings. They identify three types of psychopathology: descriptive, clinical and structural.

In the section on historical and cultural background, Federico Leoni’s chapter ‘Jaspers in his time’ traces the contributions of Goethe, Kraepelin, Dilthey, Kant, Husserl, Weber and Nietzsche to Jaspers’ thinking. This sets the scene for the rest of the book as it provides an understanding of the foundation and sources of the ideas that pervade Jaspers’ General Psychopathology. In the same section, Christophe Mundt’s chapter, the ‘Impact of Karl Jaspers’ General Psychopathology’, makes the point that Jaspers is even more relevant today, particularly in the light of the failures of current approaches to nosology and because of his focus on methodology and the problems of accessing inner subjective experience for investigation.

Chris Walker’s chapter on ‘Form and content in Jaspers’ psychopathology’ is an especial delight. There is clarity in his exposition of the nature of form and content as derived from Kant and its use in Jaspers’ phenomenology. Walker uses Jaspers’ notions of true hallucination and pseudo-hallucination as a means to examine this distinction between form and content. This account is also exemplary in its investigation of Kandinsky’s contributions to Jaspers’ thinking about pseudo-hallucination. In the same section, Matthew Broome explores ‘Jaspers and neuroscience’. Less is generally known about Jaspers’ writings on reasoning or causation in psychiatry. Broome examines this aspect of Jaspers’ work and concludes that despite his view that Mind is incomprehensible to scientific laws, Jaspers does not espouse an anti-science posture and in his life was not against neuroscientific research. What is clear, though, is that Jaspers held the view that Man has a transcendental nature and as such is ultimately free and, by definition, the totality of Man cannot be captured by scientific investigation.

Finally, Josef Parnas’ chapter ‘On psychosis: Karl Jaspers and beyond’ deals with the nature of psychosis, its definitions and markers. Parnas’ account puts centre stage ‘radical irrationality’ and ‘radical displacement from intersubjectivity’ as emblems of psychosis. Parnas makes the point that psychopathology cannot be simplified and requires careful attention to the structure of subjective experience.

The editors have pulled together some of the leading figures in psychopathology for this important book on the legacy of Karl Jaspers. Like Jaspers’ own text, this book is rich in ideas, original and fresh in its exposition of novel thinking, and most significantly, clinically relevant.