Karl Jaspers and American Psychiatry
LESTON L. HAVENS M.D.1
1 Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, 74 Fenwood Road, Boston, Mass. 02115, and Principal Psychiatrist, Massachusetts Mental Health Center
Karl Jaspers has greatly influenced the development of phenomenology, the concept of process, and existential analysis. His writings on psychopathology, largely unknown in the United States, represent the most detailed rationale of eclecticism in psychiatry. The author reviews the growth of Jaspers' thought out of Kraepelin's and its relation to the psychiatry of content, ego psychology, and the psychotherapies.
