Operationalizing the Whole of Psychic Life: Toward a Structured Framework for Psychopathology.
Psychopathology June 15, 2026 Ary Gadelha, Bernardo Haguiara, Pedro Gabriel Lorencetti et al.
Psychiatry's focus on discrete behavioral constructs has increased reliability but fragmented the understanding of mental life as a coherent whole, creating a paradox of 'more data, less coherence.' The authors revisit Karl Jaspers' concept of the whole of psychic life and propose five guiding principles—relationality, historicity, subjectivity, intentionality, and indeterminacy—to translate classical phenomenology into a framework usable in contemporary psychiatry, statistics, and neuroscience. They develop tools to isolate patterns of experience without treating them as autonomous entities, allowing reductionism as a local method rather than a global framework. The framework aims to restore context to clinical practice and integrate subjective experience with biological data.