Eugène Minkowski (April 17, 1885 - November 17, 1972) was a French psychiatrist, born in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Minkowski proposed that psychopathology should always be interpreted taking into account the personal experience of time. The main concepts created by Minkowski included the ideas of "vital contact with reality" and "lived time". He was associated with the work of Henri Ey, Eugen Bleuler and Ludwig Binswanger. According to R.D Laing, Minkowski made "the first serious attempt in psychiatry to reconstruct the other person's lived experience." He is quoted on the first page of Laing's classic The Divided Self:
"Je donne une œuvre subjective ici, œuvre cependant qui tend de toutes ses forces vers l'objectivité." (I offer you a subjective work, but a work which nevertheless struggles with all its might towards objectivity.)
He married Françoise Minkowska-Brokman, also a psychiatrist, and was the father of Alexandre Minkowski, pediatrician.
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Minkowski was born into a Jewish family from Lithuania and started his medical studies in Warsaw. However, due to political repression from the czarist government, he was compelled to accomplish his education in Munich and obtained his degree there in 1909.[1] Very soon he was attracted by philosophy. In psychiatry, he dedicated his studies to psychopathological issues related to the perception of time, influenced by phenomenology and Bergson ideas. In 1914 he finished his work entitled "Les éléments essentiels du temps-qualité", which was never published but where Minkowski his concerns with time. In 1926 Minkowski defended his dissertation, "La notion de perte de contact avec la réalité et ses applications en psychopathologie"(i.e. "The notion of the lost of contact with reality and his applications in psychopathology").