Understanding and Jaspers: naturalizing the phenomenology of psychiatry

In General Psychopathology (1997) Jaspers utilizes phenomenology as a method for investigating “individual psychic experience”. When investigating psychopathology, Jaspers claims that phenomenology aims at describing, presenting and classifying the psychic states of those with mental illness. However, Jaspers thinks we can know the psyche only via patient reports. He also believes that phenomenology should be “presuppositionless” and should not include what he calls “objective phenomena”. This paper considers the following, resulting questions. First, what does he mean by “objective” phenomena? Secondly, if the aim of phenomenology is to grasp the first person experience of a patient, is it obvious that “objective” methods should not play a role? Third: what assumptions about the nature of first person experience are revealed by Jaspers’s characterisation of phenomenology, empathy and subjective phenomena? This article will show how we can naturalize the view of mental predicates and phenomenology that is to be found in Jaspers