Eugène Minkowski

Eugène Minkowski
File:Eugène Minkowski.jpg
Born	17 April 1885 Saint Petersburg, Russia
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	Élan vital

Eugène Minkowski (April 17, 1885 - November 17, 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.

Biography

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. 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. 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). The work itself was never published but later took the form of the first chapter of his 1933 work "Les Temps Vécu" (Lived Time). 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. During the war he also wrote another two studies: "Fundamental Characteristics of the Elan Vital" and "Memory and Oblivion" followed in the winter of 1916 with "The Phenomenology of Death", all of which were never published. 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".

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 intitially 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".

During the 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.

The philosopher Merleau-Ponty, in his 1961 course at the Sorbonne in Paris, entitled Les sciences de l'homme et la phénomenologie, paid homage to Minkowski and his contribution to phenomenology, noting the influences of Husserl and Heidegger in his work. The year before, Minkowski lectured twice on phenomenology and existential analysis at the Philosophical Institute in Paris, and later published the lectures in L'Evolution psychiatrique.

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

Philosophy and Psychopathology

Overview

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 Edmund Husserl and 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.

Philosophy and Phenomenology

"Husserlian phenomenology was later joined to Bergsonism in my thought, inasmuch as both were chiefly concerned with immediate givens and were therefore closely related".

Philosophically, Minkowski was influenced by both Bergson and Husserl, 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 rarely spoke of pure “duration” as Bergson did but spoke rather of “pure time”. Minkowski’s use of personal élan rather than Bergson’s élan vital indicated his desire to elaborate an account of time which focuses on a more personal connection to time, rather than Bergson’s more metaphysical intuition of “duration”, “purity” and “vitality”. For Minkowski, however, Bergson’s mistake was to conceive of time and space as dichotomous, a failure which overlooks the lived experience of time and space as inseparable.

Minkowski's main interest in Husserlian phenomenology was its possibility of providing the human sciences with a method of engaging reality at close level. To the extent that Husserl rejected Heidegger's magnum opus Being and Time as "philosophical anthropology", Minkowski in effect embraced phenomenology as a human science which could advance the study of psychology as a science. Importantly, Minkowski rejected the notion of phenomenological intentionality (being far too conceptual for Minkowski) and his concept of a transcendental ego. Minkowski agreed with Husserl's phenomenological project in so far as it takes its standpoint from the natural world as it is given in experience, and also the the structures and laws which govern the psyche, but distinguished himself from Husserl's explicit method of pure phenomenology. Minkowski's notion of the personal élan is in opposition to the Husserlian ego, which is too limited in itself and takes its starting point from the "now" - as the personal élan forms the unified relation between the subject and the world. In Metzel’s words, Minkowski’s aim “is not to describe the purely intellectual constitution of temporal modes or the constitution of objects in subjectivity but, rather, lived time. As such, his work remains in the natural standpoint”.

In Husserl's lectures of 1925, entitled Phenomenological Psychology, Husserl developed a theory regarding the intuition of essences (Wesenschau) which are discovered via the exercise of imagination. Minkowski in part agreed with Husserl's intution of essences but denied that it was brought about via the imagination. By contrast, he thought that the world of psychopathological experience illuminates the eidetic structures of the normal lived world. Agreeing that a phenomenological description of the lived world was essential, while denying Husserl's conceptual methods, Minkowski thought that an investigation into the lived experience of the mentally ill can reveal the a priori character of the normal world itself.

The influence of Heidegger on Minkowski is not easy to discern. Heidegger's influence in France did not take effect until the mid 1930's. The first French texts influenced by Heidegger appeared in France in 1932 by Emmanuel Levinas (for an article in the Revue philosophique) and Jean Wahl (with Vers le concret: Études d'histoire de la philosophie contemporaine). Heidegger's Being and Time, although published in German in 1927, did not appear in French until 1964, although two other works What is Metaphysics? and The Essence of Reason were published in French by Henry Corbin in 1931. In the reissue of Minkowski's Le Temps vécu Minkowski stated:

"My own studies were already so far avanced when I discovered Heidegger's book that I could not examine his ideas thoroughly enough to sumarize them here and to discuss the points in common or the divergencies which might exist between us".

In regards to the similarities between Heidegger and Minkowski, both were influenced by Husserl's phenomenology, albeit in different ways. Heidegger's conception of time owes its influence to Husserl's work on Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, whereas Minkowski's conception of time owes its influence to Bergson's theory of Duration introduced in his work Time and Free Will. Both Heidegger and Minkowski deny the Cartesian Cogito as the starting point for any phenomenological explication into the notion of time. Although Heidegger's Being and Time invoked an phenomenological investigation into what he called Being-towards-death, Minkowski had written a work entitled The Phenomenology of Death some ten years prior (during World War I in 1916) to the original publication in German of Being and Time in 1927.

Psychopathology and Psychiatry

Minkowski opposed the thesis of Cartesian dualism, whereby there is a separation between the conscious cogito and the external world. The very fact that a pathologic personality displays a disconnection between themselves and the world confirms the opposite. Minkowski's first reseach 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". 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 syncronism" or what he called "syntony" (a notion which describes contact with reality previously put forward by Ernst Kretschmer).

One of the major reasons of incorporating phenomenology into psychopathology for Minkowski was that a phenomenological approach to psychopathic patients reveals a personality which is in opposition to that of the normal personality of the psychiatrist. As Nancy Metzel says "It is the recognition of this difference that allows him to specify the nature of mental illness involved. Psychopathic phenomena dramatically reveal the unfeasibility of explaining certain so-called fundamental phenomena in psychogenic or organogenetic terms. Psychogenesis is not an adequate tool in psychopathology, Minkowski believes, because, in most cases, no understandable connection can be shown betwen the prior personality and the pathologic personality".

Karl Jaspers was perhaps the first person to integrate phenomenology into psychopathology, owing much to the influences of Kant and Husserl in his major work General Psychopathology. In this work Jaspers distinguished between two kinds of psychopathological data: the "subjective phenomena of the psychic life" and the "exterior manifestations of mental life". The latter being accessible to scientific interpretation while the former cannot. Minkowski disagreed on this distinction, as he held that Jaspers failed to see how subjective phenomena can be classified, as Jaspers instead "conceived of a phenomenological description as an exhaustive description of individual symptoms".

Following Jaspers, however, Minkowski agreed that the nature of delusion is to be grasped phenomenologically. This led Minkowski to the idea of "phenomenological compensation" wherby the patient experiencing delusions attempts to compensate for a breakdown of the élan vital and "personal élan". Minkowski's approach to this was to examine the patient's personal experience of time and space which he formulated in his 1933 work Le Temps vécu (Lived Time). 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". 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)

• La Notion de perte contact vital avec la réalité et ses applications en psychopathologie (1926, Paris: Jouve)
• La schizophrénie (1927), Ed.: Payot-poche, 2002, ISBN 2-228-89603-9
• Le Temps vécu. Étude phénoménologique et psychopathologique (1933, Delachaux), Ed.: PUF-Quadrige, 1995, ISBN 2-13-046991-4
• Vers une cosmologie. Fragments philosophiques, 1936, Aubier-Montaigne, Paris
• Traité de psychopathologie (1966, PUF), Intr. de Georges Lanteri Laura, Ed. Les empêcheurs de penser en rond, ISBN 2-84324-115-4
• Au-delà du rationalisme morbide, Ed.: L'Harmattan, 2000, ISBN 2-7384-5793-2
• Écrits cliniques, Ed. Eres, 2002, ISBN 2-86586-967-9

Major Works (in English)

• Lived Time: Phenomenological and Psychopathological Studies, transl. by Nancy Metzel, Northwestern University Press, Evanston. 1970.

Articles (in French)

• 1920 "Famille B... et famille F..., contribution à l'étude de l'hérédité des maladies mentales" (in collaboration with F. Minkowska). Annales médico-psychologiques (Paris), LXXVII, 303-28.
• 1923 "Étude psychologique et analyse phénoménologique d'un cas de mélancolie schizophrénique.",Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique, 20, 543-558.
• Contribution à l'études des ideés d'influence" (in colaboration with R. Targowla). L'Encéphale, XVIII, No.10, 652-59.
• 1925 "La genèse de la notion de schizophrénie et ses caractères essentiels" , L'Évolution psychiatrique.
• 1927 "De la rêverie morbide au délire d'influence" , L'Évolution psychiatrique.
• 1938 "Á propos de l'hygiène mentale : Quelques réflexions" , Annales médicopsychologiques, avril 1938.
• 1946 L'Anesthésie Affective, Annales Médico-Psychologiques,104,80-88.
• 1952 Le Rorschach dans l'œuvre de F. Minkowska in Bulletin du groupement français du Rorschach.
• 1963 "Vers quels horizons nous emmène Bachelard", Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 17 année, no. 66, fasc 4, 1963.
• 1964 Métaphore et Symbole,Cahiers Internationaux de Symbolisme, n°5.
• 1965 À l'origine le un et le deux sont-ils nécessairement des nombres ? À propos du monisme et du dualisme, in Revue philosophique de Louvain, Volume 63.

Articles (in English)

• 1923 Findings in a Case of Schizophrenic Depression, transl. Barbara Bliss in Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology. (pp. 127-138) New York, NY, US: Basic Books. Rollo May (Ed), 1958.
• 1926 Bergson's Conceptions as Applied to Psychopathology, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease ,63, n°4, juin 1926,553-568.
• 1947 The Psychology of the Deportees, American OSE Review 4, Summer-Fall 1947.

External links

• Association Françoise & Eugène Minkowski
• Eugène Minkowski