«L’uomo è più di quello che egli sa di sé». Prospettive filosofiche nella psicopatologia jaspersiana

This paper aims at showing the historical and methodological importance of Jaspers’ Psychopathology, as well as to underline its hidden philosophical presuppositions. From Jaspers’ perspective, the individual is a totality that cannot be embraced or described by human thought: individuum est ineffabile. Man is always more than what he knows about himself in the Kantian sense, man is a regulative idea; hence the reason for Jaspers’ polemic against the methodological reductionism of positivism and against the psychological theories which purport to explain or understand the infinity of the individual in a comprehensive manner, as well as his defense of the so-called ‘methodological pluralism’. Every research based on a particular method is necessarily prospective by nature. This means, however; that no method alone can suffice to describe to individual as a whole. Psychic life must be considered as a whole that is not only infinite, but also radically adverse to any coherent systematization. From this standpoint the individual can never become object, but is the unattainable endpoint of each understanding. We will encounter this point of view further on in Jaspers critical analysis of the claim of absoluteness raised by historical religions.