Epistemology of Psychopathology

Pierre Fédida and Daniel Widlöcher, who were the editors of the Revue Internationale de Psychopathologie, in the famous preface of the journal’s 1990 inauguration issue, presented the epistemological challenge that is constitutive of psychopathology as a field of knowledge on psychic suffering: “Situated at a crossroad of multiple epistemological and methodological perspectives, psychopathology constitutes a heterogeneous discipline from the point of view of the definition of its object of study, as well as its theoretical-practical approaches” (Fédida & Widlöcher, 1990, pp. 3-4). In fact, the heterogeneity of perspectives and the constant effort toward formal delimitation of its object constitute the founding and irreducible complexity of psychopathology and, in a certain way, the raw material for its rationality efforts. Such a problem was explicitly expressed in Allgemeine Psychopathologie by Karl Jaspers. In his first pages, the great German psychiatrist-philosopher states: “In Psychopathology, there is a series of manners for consideration, a set of parallel pathways, which are, in themselves, legitimate, and which compete and do not detract from one another. My efforts aim at distinguishing, sharply separating http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1415-4714.2019v22n4p682.2