In the various editions of his General Psychopathology published between 1913 and 1946, Karl Jaspers treats Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalysis in an increasingly critical vein. His 1931 cultural-philosophical essay Man in the Modern Age goes so far as to condemn Freud's theory as a dubious ideology, and after 1945 Jaspers attacks its basic tenets once again in polemical articles. In the postwar years, the famous philosopher informs us that he had already put up “inner resistance” to psychoanalysis as a young psychiatrist and that this had been for reasons that transcended purely scientific matters. What Freud had attempted to establish through the “medium of science,” Jaspers perceived from early on as a “reprehensible” philosophy, one that he aimed to challenge even in his later years with “ideas of a completely different origin.”

Commencing around 1913, Jaspers's critique of psychoanalysis was in fact relatively benign, expressing appreciation for the field as an innovative element of descriptive hermeneutics in psychiatry. In the second edition of his General Psychopathology (1920), meanwhile, the youthful philosopher changes course. Freud is no longer a trustworthy proponent of the psychology of understanding introduced by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in the nineteenth century. In contrast to his early sympathies with psychoanalysis and his initial interest in its techniques of resistance and transference, Jaspers now calls for a symmetrical relationship between patient and physician. The psychoanalyst should not dominate the existential aspects of this communicative encounter by claiming scientific authority over the self-understanding of the person suffering from psychological problems. Further, during this period Jaspers rejects Freud's accentuation of sexuality as the etiological backbone of his theory of neurosis and comes to associate psychoanalysis, pejoratively, with fin-de-siècle culture more broadly.

General Psychopathology of 1946 was written during the war, while Jaspers and his Jewish wife, Gertrud, were subject to political persecution and forced to withdraw conspicuously from public life. The former professor of philosophy at Heidelberg University now developed a more philosophical criticism of psychoanalysis, giving existential self-reflection pride of place in his conception of psychopathology and banishing psychological hermeneutics to the symptomatological periphery.