An existential understanding of psychotherapy and psychiatric practice

In this paper Karl Jaspers' writings on psychotherapy and the psychiatric practice will be profoundly investigated and a meticulous reconstruction of the development of his understandings in the course of his oeuvre will be presented. This reconstruction allows for arguing that Jaspers displays a methodologically critical attitude towards medicine as a 'science of actions' and that he did refrain from developing an existential psychotherapy for methodological and existential reasons. Nonetheless and aside from Jaspers' abstention, some of his concepts from existential philosophy, like 'Grenzsituation' (border-situation, limit-situation) or 'Gehäuse' (shell, housings), can be extraordinarily fruitful in psychotherapy and in the psychiatric practice because it requires a change of attitude in order to bring these concepts into play. This different attitude could be called the attitude of the fellow sufferer, or, more neutral, the attitude of the fellow human being.