Eugène Minkowski

• 1. Introduction

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  Eugène Minkowski was born on the 17th of April 1885 in Saint Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire, into a Jewish Polish family. He would go on to fight in two world battles, fund the publication of his own major book after failing to find a publisher, and help save thousands of Jewish children during the Nazi occupation of France. He authored around 250 clinical papers in at least four languages. Yet at the center of all of it was a single, strange question: what does time feel like from the inside, and what happens to a person when that feeling breaks down?

  Minkowski watched that question lead him from the wards of the Burghölzli clinic in Zurich, where Carl Gustav Jung and Ludwig Binswanger had worked before him, to the trenches of the Somme and Verdun, and eventually to a chair at Sainte-Anne's Psychiatric Hospital in Paris. Along the way he built a school of thought that placed the patient's subjective experience of time at the heart of psychiatry itself.

• 2. Roots and Formation

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  August Minkowski, a Warsaw banker, was Eugène's father. The family lived in Saint Petersburg until Eugène was seven, then returned to the Polish capital, where he attended school and began medical training at the Imperial University of Warsaw. A czarist crackdown forced the university to close temporarily in 1905. That interruption scattered Minkowski across German-speaking Europe: three semesters at the University of Breslau, two at the University of Göttingen, and a final three at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, where he earned his medical degree in 1909.

  Practice in Kazan followed, required for Russian certification. There he met Franciszka Brokman, also a physician, who would later be known professionally as Françoise. They married in 1913 and settled in Munich, where Françoise continued her psychiatric work while Eugène studied mathematics and philosophy. The lectures he attended were given by Alexander Pfänder and Moritz Geiger, both pupils of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenological philosophy. That contact planted the seeds of the method Minkowski would apply to psychiatry for the rest of his career.

• 3. War, Bergson, and a Dormant Drawer

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  World War I drove the couple to Zurich, where they sheltered with Minkowski's brother Mieczysław, known as Michel. Both husband and wife became assistants to Eugen Bleuler at the Burghölzli, the university clinic that had already shaped Jung and Binswanger. In 1914 Minkowski completed a work titled "Les éléments essentiels du temps-qualité" on the essential elements of time-quality. Then in 1915 he volunteered as a military medic for the French Army.

  The family was growing at the same time as the war was at its most destructive. A son, Alexandre, was born in 1915; he would later become a pioneer of French neonatology and the father of the orchestra conductor Marc Minkowski. A daughter, Jeannine, a future lawyer, followed in 1918. Meanwhile Minkowski saw action at the Battle of the Somme and the Battle of Verdun. His conduct in those engagements earned him the Croix de Guerre and eventually a place as an officer of the Legion of Honour, along with French nationality.

  It was during this period that the philosopher Henri Bergson became decisive for him. Bergson's critique of how standard science misunderstood time and life struck Minkowski as pointing directly at what psychiatry was missing. After the armistice, he described those years plainly: "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 disappointments, 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."

• 4. Time, Schizophrenia, and the Published Drawer

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  Paris became the family's permanent home after the war. Minkowski returned to medicine, drawing on unpublished work he had built around Bergson's ideas. He had known Bergson personally, and that relationship shaped his 1926 doctoral thesis on the loss of contact with reality and its applications in psychopathology. That same year he began work at Sainte-Anne's Psychiatric Hospital, the leading mental facility in the French capital.

  His 1927 book "La Schizophrénie" proposed that the illness was due to a deficiency of intuition, a deficient sense of time, and a progressive overdevelopment of spatial thinking. He distinguished this from the experience of healthy people, who he said lived a "vital synchronism" with the world, a sense he called "syntony," a term borrowed from the psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer. Where syntony meant living in step with the flow of time, schizophrenia represented a disconnection from that flow altogether.

  His account of autism within schizophrenia departed sharply from Eugen Bleuler, whom he otherwise admired. Bleuler had emphasized inner fantasy life as the core of schizophrenic autism. Minkowski disagreed. He argued that the typical schizophrenic patient displayed what he called "poor autism," characterized by a poverty of both feeling and thought rather than a rich inner world. "Rich autism," he maintained, appeared only when a patient possessed an independent tendency toward expressivity that existed alongside the disorder, not because of it. He also took issue with Emil Kraepelin's account on the same subject.

  His masterwork on lived time, "Le Temps vécu. Études phénoménologique et psychopathologiques," appeared in 1933. Unable to find a publisher at first, Minkowski paid for a thousand copies himself. It was eventually published by J.L.L. d'Artrey, to whom Minkowski dedicated the new edition. Decades later this book became the only one of his works translated into English, appearing in 1970 in a version by Nancy Metzel for Northwestern University Press.

• 5. L'Evolution Psychiatrique

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  In 1925 Minkowski was among the co-founders of a movement and journal called "L'Évolution psychiatrique," meaning Psychiatric Evolution. The journal served as a vehicle for introducing French readers to the work of Eugen Bleuler, Karl Jaspers, and Ludwig Binswanger, among others. Its directors were A. Hesnard and R. Laforgue, and its contributors in the first volume included Minkowski's wife, listed as Mme F. Minkowska, alongside R. Allendy, A. Borel, H. Claude, and others. Minkowski himself contributed an article titled "La Genèse de la Notion de Schizophrénie et ses Caractères Essentiels" to that first volume, along with a survey of the modern history of psychiatry.

  The journal placed Minkowski at the center of a network linking psychiatric practice to the broader philosophical currents flowing through Europe at the time. His ability to write fluently in French, German, Polish, Spanish, and English gave him unusual reach across that network.

• 6. Resistance and Reckoning

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  World War II found Minkowski in the French Resistance. He directed the work of a charity whose mission was to protect children from the Shoah, and by the end of the war the organization had saved thousands of Jewish children. In 1946 he delivered one of the first Basel lectures on psychological suffering under Nazi persecution. He went on to serve as an expert witness in numerous legal proceedings arising from that period.

  The psychiatrist R.D. Laing later credited Minkowski with making the first serious attempt in psychiatry to reconstruct another person's lived experience, and called him the first figure in the field to bring the nature of phenomenological investigation clearly into view. Laing placed a line from Minkowski on the opening page of his own classic work "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."

  The University of Zurich awarded Minkowski an honorary doctorate in 1955, and the University of Warsaw followed with one in 1965. He died on the 17th of November 1972, and his funeral drew a large crowd that included his longtime friend and collaborator, the psychiatrist Henri Ey.