Eugène Minkowski

Eugène Minkowski
Born 17 April 1885
Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire
Died 17 November 1972(1972-11-17) (aged 87)
Paris, France
Era 20th-century philosophy
Region Western Philosophy
School Psychiatry, Philosophy
Main interests
 Phenomenology, Psychopathology
Notable ideas
 Personal élan

Eugène Minkowski (17 April 1885 – 17 November 1972) was a French psychiatrist known for his incorporation of phenomenology into psychopathology and exploring the notion of "lived time". A student of Eugen Bleuler, he was also associated with the work of Henri Ey, and Ludwig Binswanger. Philosophically he was influenced by Henri Bergson and phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler.

Life and career

Minkowski was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, 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] He then took up the study of philosophy and moved further away from medicine, almost to the point of abandoning it. In 1913 he married Françoise Minkowska-Brokman, also a psychiatrist and they had a child Alexandre Minkowski who went on to become a pediatrician. The couple settled in Munich, where Françoise pursued her studies in medicine while Eugène took up the study of mathematics and philosophy, attending the lectures of Alexander Pfänder and Moritz Geiger, pupils of Edmund Husserl.[2] The outbreak of World War I forced them to retreat to Zurich with Eugène's brother. In Zurich, Eugène and his wife both became assistants to Eugen Bleuler at the Burghölzli, a university clinic where many other notable psychiatrists and psychoanalysts trained and practiced such as Carl Gustav Jung and Ludwig Binswanger. In 1914 he finished a work entitled Les éléments essentiels du temps-qualité (The Essential Elements of Time-Quality). In March 1915 he enlisted as a volunteer in the French army, where his bravery earned him many military decorations including the Croix de Guerre. He became an officer of the Legion of Honor and obtained French nationality. Of this period of his life and the war, Minkowski said:

"During the war we were waiting for peace, hoping to take up again the life that we had abandoned. In reality, a new period began, a period of difficulties and deceptions, of setbacks and painful, often fruitless efforts to adapt oneself to new problems of existence. The calm propitious to philosophic thought was far from reborn. Long, arid, and somber years followed the war. My work lay dormant and the bottom of my drawer".[3]

After the war, Minkowski returned to his medical studies which left him with little time for philosophy due to his clinical work. He then dedicated his studies to psychopathological issues related to the perception of time, heavily influenced by his previous unpublished work on Henri Bergson, whom he knew personally. In 1926 Minkowski defended his dissertation, "La notion de perte de contact avec la réalité et ses applications en psychopathologie" ("The Notion of Loss of Contact with Reality and its Applications in Psychopathology") and began work at St. Anne's Hospital for the Insane in Paris. In 1927 he published La Schizophrénie (Schizophrenia) followed by Les Temps Vécu (Lived Time) in 1933. In Lived Time, his only book to be published in English, Minkowski sought to unite phenomenological ideas with psychopathology, where he proposed that psychopathological studies of patients should always be interpreted by taking into account the personal experience of time. Minkowski was initially unable to find a publisher for the work and ended up publishing one thousand copies himself with funds from himself and his father. Les Temps Vécu was eventually published by J.L.L. d'Artrey to whom Minkowski dedicated the reissue of Les Temps Vécu and said:

"This man had such a great love for books that he abandoned a career in government in order to devote all of his energies to the small publishing house which he had recently established. Our journal, L'Evolution psychiatrique, which was founded shortly after World War I by a group of young psychiatrists in search of a publisher, was also given assistance by Mr. d'Artrey. As a token of my appreciation, I am dedicating the reissue of this book to J.L.L. d'Artrey, a man who gave himself unstintingly in order to meet the financial needs of his publishing house and of his authors. Without him, Lived Time would probably not have been published".[4]

During World War II, Minkowski directed the work Save the Children of the Holocaust, which saved thousands of Jewish children. In 1946 he gave one of the first Basel lectures on the psychological suffering of Nazi persecution and went on to intervene in numerous lawsuits filed in respect of such crimes.

Eugène Minkowski died in 1972 and his burial was attended by many, including Henri Ey.

Philosophy and psychopathology

The two main influences upon Minkowski's thought were Eugen Bleuler and Henri Bergson, who both represented for him the two major fields of thought which he attempted to synthesize, psychiatry and philosophy. Prior to the war, he had a great interest in philosophy, particularly the phenomenology of Max Scheler. It was only after the war that Minkowski actively sought to integrate philosophy into his psychopathological work, taking a similar approach to Karl Jaspers, who influenced him, by introducing phenomenology as a method applied to psychopathological investigations on patients suffering from mental disturbances. The introduction of the phenomenological method into psychopathology, for Minkowski, is the attempt to understand the lived experience of the mentally ill. In such cases, distortions of lived time or lived space are evident; some patients are distorted in terms of time, others in terms of space.

Philosophically, Minkowski was influenced by both Bergson and Scheler, both of whom developed unique and individual accounts of time. At the beginning of his career, Minkowski was very much influenced by Bergson’s 1889 work Time and Free Will and his analyses of the irrational nature of time. Following Bergson's account of élan vital, Minkowski developed what he called a "personal élan" which expresses the essential source of the constitution of time.

Minkowski's first research on the psychopathology of schizophrenia was inspired by the work of Bergson and appeared in his 1927 work La Schizophrénie. Schizophrenia, according to Minkowski is "characterized by a deficiency of intuition and of lived time and by a progressive hypertrophy of the intelligence and spatial factors".[5] Following on from his dissertation, La notion de perte de contact avec la réalité (The Loss of Contact with Reality), his work on schizophrenia claimed that schizophrenic patients display a "loss of vital contact with reality" whereby normal subjects, by contrast, experience life as a "lived synchronism" or what he called "syntony" (a notion which describes contact with reality previously put forward by Ernst Kretschmer).

According to R.D. Laing, Minkowski made "the first serious attempt in psychiatry to reconstruct the other person's lived experience" and was "the first figure in psychiatry to bring the nature of phenomenological investigations clearly into view".[6] 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.)

Major works (in French)

Major works (in English)

Articles (in German)

Articles (in French)

Articles (in English)

Articles (in Spanish)

References

  1. ↑ "International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis". Retrieved 7 June 2011.
  2. ↑ Spiegelberg, Herbert (1972). Phenomenology in Psychology and Psychiatry. Northwestern University Press. p. 237. ISBN 0810103575.
  3. ↑ Lived Time: Phenomenological and Psychopathological Studies, transl. by Nancy Metzel, Northwestern University Press, Evanston. 1970. pp. 6-7.
  4. ↑ Lived Time, p. xxxvii.
  5. ↑ Lived Time, p. 272.
  6. ↑ R.D. Laing, "Minkowski and Schizophrenia," Review of Existential Psychology XI (1963), 207.
  7. ↑ Jonathan Crary, "Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern culture".

External links

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