Against Solitude

Letters

Vol. 28 No. 12 · 22 June 2006

From Tom Burns

‘Who now still reads Karl Jaspers?’ Martin Jay begins his review of Suzanne Kirkbright’s biography of the philosopher (LRB, 8 June). Well, we psychiatrists do, or at least we older ones did. His philosophy may have been expressed in ‘turgid idiom’, but his psychiatric masterpiece, General Psychopathology (1913), was not. Most Anglophone readers think it worth buying for the fifty-page introductory chapter alone. If Jaspers’s philosophy was preoccupied with those ‘aspects of the human condition that defied rational understanding’, then it is unsurprising that he was so well suited to the exploration of mental illness. His work is outstanding for its vivid and penetrating descriptions of the seemingly alien experiences his patients struggled to communicate. Jay emphasises the value Jaspers accorded relationships and this is most evident in his insistence on psychiatry as an interaction between two individuals, rather than simply as the exercise of trained observation. His comments may be even more important now, as psychiatry risks drifting into an impoverished and mechanistic scientism.

Tom Burns
Warneford Hospital, Oxford