Karl Jaspers, Eugene Minkowski and Ludwig Binswanger are the founders of phenomenological psychopathology. It was Jaspers who first brought phenomenology into psychopathology. Minkowski was the first to introduce phenomenology into psychiatry in France. Binswanger devoted himself to replacing the psychoanalysis of Freud with the existentialism of Heidegger. In the 1970s, mainstream psychiatry gradually turned a cold shoulder to phenomenological psychopathology due to the overspreading of natural-science methodology, which turned psychopathology from an interdisciplinary science of liberal arts and natural science into a pure natural science dominated by neuroscience. However, phenomenological psychopathology has undergone a significant revival during the last twenty years because psychiatrists have paid more and more attention to patients' subjective experience and have published a large number of papers and books in this field. Jaspers proposed that the key criterion for diagnosing delusion is the contrariety or the break of patients' personality as is reflected in their language and originated from some unknown neurophysiologic process. That is the reason why in his diagnosis of delusion Jaspers put emphasis on both the context of personality development and the research on neurophysiology. The neurophysiologic foundation of delusion was speculated by Jaspers, but contemporary phenomenological psychopathology has postulated it as hyperdopaminergia. It is the abnormal dopamine firing that leads to the aberrant assignment of salience to the elements of one's experience at the phenomenological level. As far as schizophrenia is concerned, mainstream psychopathology focuses mainly on its physiological and cognitive mechanism, while phenomenological psychopathology emphasizes the systematic study of its subjective experience. According to Minkowski, schizophrenia possesses two aspects. One is that patients tend to manifest a loss of vital contact with reality and a dulling of subjective lives.The other is the tendency of over-rationalization and/or a kind of geometrical or quasi-mathematical abstraction. But according to Wolfgang Blankenburg, the central defect of schizophrenia is the loss of natural self-evidence. So patients have to fully concentrate and consciously control the processes which are automatically completed by normal people. Josef Parnas and Luis Sass expanded Minkowski's idea and proposed that schizophrenia is characterized by two kinds of abnormal consciousness and ego experience, i.e. diminished self-affection and hyperreflexivity. In summary, phenomenological psychopathology provides a rich description of the subjective experience with regard to the mental diseases and integrates phenomenological description with neural physiological explanation. Mental disability is neither an abstract concept nor a phenomenon which finds its definition only in neural physiology, but the abnormality of the pre-consciousness self-affection and the structure of subjective experiences. Phenomenological psychopathology overcomes the academism and emptiness of phenomenological philosophy and realizes Husserl's phenomenological commitment of returning to the living world. Its development and revival clearly show that philosophy not only can but also need intervene in the real life of human beings rather than stay in its ivory tower.