Abstract
Karl Jaspers was the first major author who emphasized empathy as the proper method of the phenomenological approach to human psychopathology (“static understanding”). He divided mental symptoms into subjective and objective
ones, stressing the crucial importance of the former. Subjective symptoms are mainly those expressing patients’ emotions as well as those experienced by them and verbally communicated during the diagnostic interview. Whereas the
expressive symptoms can be grasped immediately by clinicians, the understanding of the experienced ones is mediated
by patients’ verbal communications as re-experienced or actualized in clinicians’ own consciousness. Thus, jaspersian
empathic understanding is mediated by two distinct processes: the first is a direct and automatic one, whereas the
second is an effortful process of “feeling oneself into other’s condition” or of “immersing oneself in other people’s
self-description” which has to be learned by systematic and rigorous training. Both processes provide the core of what
Jaspers called “static understanding”. This paper aims to show that Jaspers’ static understanding prefigures two main
types of empathy emerging from contemporary scientific research in neuroscience and social psychology, namely “automatic emotional empathy” and “cognitive empathy”.