Cosa significa comprendere? Max Weber e la Allgemeine Psychopathologie di Karl Jaspers

The young Jaspers was deeply impressed by Weber’s methodological reflection upon the subject of the Verstehen. This helped him to distinguish, in the field of the psychopathological theory, a kind of knowledge which aims at what is understandable from a different kind of knowledge which pivots only on the explanation of non-understandable causal relations. However, as Ernst M. Manasse pointed out in a 1957 essay, «Weber himself welcomed Jaspers’ continuation of his own analyses and in turn referred to Jaspers when he later characterized his own approach as “verstehende sociology”», along the lines of Jaspers’ «verstehende psychology». This article aims at developing this hint and at highlighting the reasons why Weber appraises Jasper’s dealing with the subject of the understanding, which is at the center of the Allgemeine Psychopathologie (1913).