Karl Jaspers, a psychiatrist, theologian and philosopher, is the father of psychopathology. His work General Psychopathology (translated 2013) is a classic in the psychiatric literature. He believed that mental illness, in particular psychosis, should be evaluated with regard to the abnormal phenomena that are present – for example, hallucination, delusions, thought disorder – rather than to their content. The latter (content) was the focus of the psychoanalytic school who argued that content was a clue to underlying traumas and issues that may have contributed to the person’s current state. So whether the content of a delusion was persecutory or guilt-laden, Jaspers believed, was less important than the presence per se of the delusion. Thus, he was distinguishing between form (primary or secondary, systematised or non-systematised, etc.) and content (e.g., persecutory, guilt and nihilistic).