As psychiatrist, Karl Jaspers believed that patients who suffer from primary delusions would effectively be “un-understandable” and therefore untreatable in a therapeutic manner for the psychiatrist, since there are no rational coherent processes that shaped their views and their way of sense-making of their world (Jaspers, 1997, pp. 98–104).
The idea that the inner life of a delusional individual could be un-understandable seems like a self-defeating approach to psychopathology. But Jaspers was a brilliant scholar who became increasingly interested in philosophy and less concerned with his psychiatric career. He declared that clinical practice became less attractive to him than the philosophical theories that he admirably articulated in his professional practice.
Selected Readings:
Jaspers, K. (1955). Reason and Existenz. New York: The Noonday Press.
Jaspers, K. (1997). General Psychopathology, Vol. 1. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.