Clinical psychopathology

Clinical psychopathology aims at the identification of symptoms that are significant in view of nosographical distinctions. Schneider affirms that this discipline aims at becoming the “psychopathological doctrine of symptoms and diagnosis” - the link between descriptive psychopathology and nosography. It restricts the task of the psychopathological inquiry to the search for diagnostically relevant symptoms being interested in eliciting first and foremost those abnormal psychic phenomena that help the clinician to establish a reliable diagnosis.Although clinical psychopathology is at risk of flattening the practice of psychopathology to that of nosographical diagnosis, it also serves an epistemologically important function since it is concerned with generalizing the individual case and subsuming it into a general category. It complements the view of descriptive psychopathology (which keeps the individual and its complexity …