Short answers, pulled from the story.
Eugène Minkowski was a French psychiatrist of Jewish Polish origin, born on the 17th of April 1885 in Saint Petersburg and died on the 17th of November 1972. He is known for incorporating phenomenology into psychopathology and for his concept of "lived time," which he developed most fully in his 1933 book "Le Temps vécu."
Minkowski identified the core disturbance in schizophrenia as a loss of "vital contact with reality," which he called the "trouble générateur" or generative disturbance. He distinguished two forms of schizophrenic autism: "rich autism" (autisme riche) and "poor autism" (autisme pauvre), arguing that the typical patient exhibited poverty of feeling and thought rather than a rich inner fantasy life, departing from Bleuler's earlier account.
"Le Temps vécu," published in 1933, proposes that patients' pathologies should always be interpreted through their subjective experience of time. Unable to find a publisher initially, Minkowski funded a thousand copies himself; the book was eventually published by J.L.L. d'Artrey and translated into English by Nancy Metzel for Northwestern University Press in 1970.
Bergson's critique of how standard science understood time and life convinced Minkowski that psychopathology needed to be grounded in philosophy and individual experience. Minkowski had known Bergson personally and drew on his unpublished work on Bergson's ideas when writing his 1926 doctoral thesis and his 1927 book "La Schizophrénie."
Minkowski was active in the French Resistance and directed a charity that saved thousands of Jewish children from the Shoah. In 1946 he gave one of the first Basel lectures on psychological suffering under Nazi persecution and later testified as an expert witness in numerous lawsuits related to that period.
Laing credited Minkowski with making the first serious attempt in psychiatry to reconstruct another person's lived experience and called him the first figure in psychiatry to bring phenomenological investigation clearly into view. Laing placed a quotation from Minkowski on the opening page of his book "The Divided Self."