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Studi Jaspersiani

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Humanities, Literature & Arts (General) Literature & Writing Philosophy

The journal ‘Studi Jaspersiani’ dedicates its next volume (2023) to Pathographies, Life Stories and Biographies. One hundred years after Strindberg und Van Gogh

Edited by Anna Donise

Although the first to introduce the term ‘pathography’ was probably the neuropsychiatrist Paul Julius Möbius (1853-1907), a few years later first Freud – particularly in his 1910 paper on Leonardo Da Vinci – and then Jaspers, with his General Psychopathology of 1913, picked it up and contributed to outlining its conceptual breadth.

Issue XI of the Rivista di Studi Jaspersiani wishes to invite scholars from different disciplines to reflect on the extraordinary heuristic potential of the category of ‘pathography’ by celebrating the 100th anniversary of the first Jaspersian work fully dedicated to this particular form of biographical narrative: Strindberg und Van Gogh: Versuch einer Pathographischen Analyse unter vergleichender Heranziehung von Swedenborg und Hölderlin (1922), in which Jaspers compares four pathographies of brilliant men.

In his early works, Jaspers devoted ample space to the so-called ‘life stories’, in which he reconstructed the biography of some of the inmates of the Heidelberg clinic, placing particular emphasis on pathological events, from the suspicious watchmaker in Ein Beitrag zur Frage, Entwicklung einer Persönlichkeit oder Prozess? (1910) to the dangerous baby-sitters in Heimweh und Verbrechen (1908). In later years, however, his biographical analysis shifted from the common patient to some individuals endowed with exceptional gifts whose works have value for the entire community.

The invitation to reflect on the category of ‘pathography’ can be understood from several points of view: Jaspers elaborates on the relevance of the first-person narrative and, in line – at least on this point – with Freud, considers it indispensable to take into account how the patient experiences and describes their condition. Even in the pathography of a ‘great man’, it is the subject in question who describes his state of mind and his moments of crisis, and he does so through (narrative or poetic) words or even through pictorial expression – this is the case with van Gogh, including stroke, perspective, shapes or colour. In the early 1970s this idea was placed at the centre of humanistic psychology and since the 1980s it has become one of the central aspects of narrative medicine. Yet in neither tradition does Jaspers play an important role, despite the fact that he was among the first to realise the importance of analysing and describing the lives of patients in order to find another route to understanding and treating mental illness.

From an epistemological point of view, on the other hand, pathography – like biography or life history – constitutes a valuable tool for moving from the infinite multiplicity of subjective experience, described phenomenologically, to the conceptual construction necessary to understand others and make a diagnosis. The question is, however, where this category stands when compared with the ‘eidetic reduction’ proposed by Husserl on the one hand, and the Weberian ‘ideal type’ on the other.

Finally, pathography also shows its heuristic power on another level. The connection between genius and psychic pathology has always fascinated humankind, and historically subjects with psychosis are often represented quite differently from the mentally healthy. It is almost as if mental illness were the symbol of a ‘profound human mystery’. When pathology comes with genius, is it able to express otherwise unattainable aspects of the human condition?

In virtue of such an extended research frame, we invite to reflect, among others, on the following issues: