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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Henkilön psykiatria : psykiatrian dialektinen filosofia

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The Finnish word ’henkilö’ is difficult to translate in English as a ‘Person’, but in international plan-language, Esperanto, we can quite exactly translate it as ‘spiritulo’. The word henkilö, spiritulo, is developed in the 19th century from the ancient Finnish word ‘henki’ by the medical doctor in Jyväskylä region Wolmar Schildt-Kilpinen. He was not satisfied with the simple translation from Latin word ‘persona’ to Finnish ‘persoona’, and so via the ancient word he conceptually combined the spiritulo to the dialectical process of negation of negation of the ethnic culture – elite culture – national culture. So the spiritulo could express the community (Gemeinschaft) and common (gemein) at the individual level and so it was connected to the Snellmanian philosophy of spirit. The conceptual content the spiritulo got from the Snellmanian idea of personality. Although the spiritulo and person are often used as synonyms, conceptually the dimension of depth of spiritulo in relation to the dimension of extent of person becomes actual in the ethical need of psychiatry to encounter the human individual. The encountering of human being means an ontological perspective in the philosophy of psychiatry and not the prevailing perspective of the philosophy of science of psychopathology, which deals with pathological symptoms and also the human being as its gnoseological object. Karl Jaspers dealt with the philosophy of psychiatry ontologically when he developed phenomenological psychiatry in his classical work Allgemeine Psychopathologie. Although Snellman and Jaspers did not know the word spiritulo, with Snellmanian philosophy we can use also Jaspersian philosophy, when we deal with the concept of spiritulo and its impact in the philosophy of psychiatry.