[Reflections on a theoretical psychopathology]

One of the central tasks of theoretical psychopathology is the treatment of the question of in which sense one can speak of illness in the field of psychic mistakenness. A dynamic, an ontological and a relational illness conception are depicted. Of necessity, the conception of the illness determines the comprehension of the talk of an illness symptom. By differentiating between homologous and analogous symptoms, justice is done to the fact that psychopathologic description is based, on the one hand, on the description of subjective suffering and, on the other hand, in the service of a psychiatrically relevant diagnosis.