International review of psychiatry
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Jaspers' AllgemeinePsychopathologie, the General Psychopathology, published in 1923, had a profound influence on the development of psychiatry. Central to it was the attempt to give the new psychiatry a philosophical foundation, the key element in which was the dichotomy between meaningful and causal connections. This dichotomy was superimposed on the earlier mind-body distinction, and both converged on the conclusion that mind and meaning were problematic from the point of view of science. ⋯ At the same time however there was emerging a new paradigm that effectively deconstructed the problematic, namely, the cognitive or information-processing paradigm. This paradigm has made it possible to construct a unified bio-psycho-social science of psychopathology. In psychotherapy, the shift has been away from the view that meaning is non-causal, a matter only of existential significance or of hermeneutic interpretation, towards the working assumption that it is crucially involved in aetiology, as in the new cognitive behaviour therapy paradigm.