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Eugène (Eugeniusz) Minkowski (French
pronunciation: [øʒɛn mɛ̃kɔwski]; 17 April 1885 – 17 November 1972) was a French
psychiatrist of Jewish Polish origin, known for his incorporation of
phenomenology into psychopathology and for exploring the notion of "lived
time". A student of Eugen Bleuler, he was also associated with the work of
Ludwig Binswanger and Henri Ey. He was influenced by phenomenological
philosophy and the vitalistic philosophy of Henri Bergson, and by the
phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler; therefore his work departed
from classical medical and psychological models. He was a prolific author in
several languages and regarded as a great humanitarian. Minkowski accepted the
phenomenological essence of schizophrenia as the "trouble générateur"
("generative disturbance"), which he thought consists in a loss of
"vital contact with reality" and shows itself as autism. Minkowski
was born in Saint Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire, into a Jewish
Polish family. He was second of the four sons of August Minkowski, a Warsaw
banker and his wife, Tekla, née Lichtenbaum. When he was 7 years old, the
family returned to the Polish capital, where he attended school and started his
medical studies at the Imperial University of Warsaw. However, because of
political repression from the czarist government, the university was
temporarily closed in 1905. He was obliged to continue his studies at Breslau
University (3 semesters), at Göttingen University (2 semesters) and finally, at
Munich University (3 semesters)[2] where he obtained his medical degree in 1909.[3]
As a Russian subject, he went on to practice medicine in Kazan to obtain
Russian certification, and while there met his future wife, Franciszka Brokman,
also a doctor and later known as 'Françoise'. They married in 1913. The couple
settled in Munich, where Françoise pursued further work in psychiatry while
Eugène took up the study of mathematics and philosophy, attending lectures by
Alexander Pfänder and Moritz Geiger, pupils of Edmund Husserl.[4] In Munich he
became acquainted with Germanic philosophy. The outbreak of World War I forced
them to seek refuge in Zürich with Minkowski's brother, Mieczysław (Michel).
There, Minkowski and his wife both became assistants to Eugen Bleuler at the
Burghölzli, a university clinic where Carl Gustav Jung and Ludwig Binswanger
had practised earlier. In 1914 he finished a work entitled "Les éléments
essentiels du temps-qualité" – "The Essential Elements of
Time-Quality". At the beginning of the World War I Minkowski volunteered
in the French Army in 1915 as a military medic. In 1915, the couple had a son,
Alexandre Minkowski, later a pioneer of French neonatology and father of the
noted orchestra conductor, Marc Minkowski, followed in 1918 by a daughter,
Jeannine, a lawyer. In the war he saw action at the Battle of the Somme and the
Battle of Verdun, where his bravery earned him several citations and military
decorations, including the Croix de Guerre. He became an officer of the Legion
of Honour and obtained French nationality. In France Minkowski came under the
influence of the famous French philosopher Henri Bergson, who critiqued
standard scientific views of time and of life. [5] Minkowski was convinced that
psychopathology should be closer to philosophy and closer to individual
philosophers' views.[5] For Minkowski, Bergson was the paradigmatic
philosopher. [5]
After the war he 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 at the bottom of my
drawer".[6]
After World War I, when his enlistment came to an
end, he adopted French nationality. The family moved again to Paris permanently
and Minkowski returned to medicine and partially abandoned his philosophical
pursuits. He worked on the perception of time as a vector in psychopathology,
drawing heavily on his unpublished work on Bergson, whom he had known
personally. In 1925 he became one of the co-founders of a movement and a French
journal in psychiatry, known as "L'Évolution psychiatrique" –
"Psychiatric Evolution". "L'Évolution psychiatrique", which
introduced the work of Eugen Bleuler and several other psychiatrists, such as
Karl Jaspers and Ludwig Binswanger. Directors of "l'Ėvolution
psychiatrique" were A. Hesnard and R. Laforgue.[7] Original works and
critical studies in the journal have been made by messieurs R. Allendy, A.
Borel, A. Ceillier, H. Claude, H. Codet, J. Damourette, A. Hesnard, R.
Laforgue, Mme F. Minkowska, E. Minkowski, É Pichon, Robin, R. de Saussure,
Schiff and J. Vinchon.[7] In 1925 Minkowski contributed articles to the first
volume of "L'Ėvolution psychiatrique" : "La Génèse de la Notion
de Schizophrénie et ses Caractères Essentiels" – "Genesis of the
Notion of Schizophrenia and its Essential Features". As a bonus he
published a page about the modern history of psychiatry.[7]
In 1926 he wrote a doctoral thesis on
""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, which was based on the works of Henri
Bergson and Eugen Bleuler, and began work at Sainte-Anne's Psychiatric
Hospital, a leading mental hospital in Paris. Minkowski thought that autism is
the patient's loss of vital contact with reality (perte de contact vital avec
la réalité). He distinguished two types of schizophrenic autism: 'rich or
florid autism' (autisme riche) & 'poor autism' (autisme pauvre), i.e.
autism characterized by affective and cognitive "poverty".[8] But
Minkowski disagreed with Bleuler on several points. First, he did not believe
that the necessary component of autism is "the predominance of inner
fantasy life". In truth, he claimed that a typical schizophrenic patient
has the "poor autism", which he characterized by the poverty of
affective and cognitive processes. On that subject, he also criticized
Bleuler's description of schizophrenic autism together with Emil Kraepelin.
Minkowski claimed that "rich autism" happened only when a
schizophrenic patient was equipped with an autism-independent inclination
toward affective and cognitive expressivity. Just as important, Minkowski
considered autism as a both fundamental and primary disorder of schizophrenia.
Other psychopathological features of schizophrenia could be comprehended in
terms of it.
In 1927 he published "La Schizophrénie"
on schizophrenia, followed in 1933, by "Le Temps vécu. Études
phénoménologique et psychopathologiques" – "Lived Time.
Phenomenological and Psychopathological Studies". In this, his only book so
far translated into English, Minkowski sought to use phenomenology as an
approach to psychopathology. He proposed that the pathology of patients should
always be interpreted in light of their subjective experience of time. Unable
initially to find a publisher he funded a thousand copies himself. It was
eventually published by J.L.L. d'Artrey to whom Minkowski dedicated the new
edition of the work. Minkowski was in the Resistance during World War II and
directed the work of a charity to protect children from the Shoah that saved
thousands of Jewish children. In 1946 he gave one of the first Basel lectures
on psychological suffering during Nazi persecution and went on to testify as an
expert witness in numerous subsequent lawsuits. He was the author of some 250
clinical papers and publications.[9] Eugène Minkowski died in 1972. His funeral
was attended by a large crowd, including his psychiatrist friend and
collaborator, Henri Ey.
Philosophy and psychopathology
Philosophically, Minkowski was influenced by
Bergson and the phenomenologist Max Scheler, who had developed separate
accounts of Time, (see 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 named as vital energy, an account of the essence of
time. He was also attracted by the practice of the Swiss psychiatrist, Eugen
Bleuler and attempted to synthesize ideas from psychiatry with philosophy,
taking an approach similar to Karl Jaspers. He introduced phenomenology as part
of his investigations into psychopathology. He sought thereby to explain the
experience of patients who appeared to suffer from distortions of time and/or
space. Minkowski's first research into the psychopathology of schizophrenia was
inspired by Bergson and appeared in his 1927 work La Schizophrénie, which he
thought was "due to a deficiency of intuition, a sense of time and to a
progressive hypertrophy of the grasp of spatial factors".[10] Based on his
dissertation, he considered that schizophrenic patients display a "loss of
vital contact with reality" unlike others who experienced life as a
"lived synchronism" or what he called "syntony", a notion
borrowed from 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".[11] 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 was awarded honorary doctorates by the
University of Zurich in 1955 and the University of Warsaw in 1965.