On the work of Eugène Minkowski, Le temps vécu (lived time) : 1935 : Jacques Lacan

Under the title Psychology and Aesthetics, an account by Jacques Lacan appeared in Recherches philosophiques 1935, fac. 4, p. 424‐ 431, on the work of E. Minkowski, Le temps vécu. Études phénoménologiques et psychopathologiques [Phenomenological and psychopathological studies], Paris, Coll. de l’Évolution psychiatrique.

Translated by Anthony Chadwick, with notes by Richard G. Klein

Published at www.Freud2Lacan.com / Lacan (82. Sur l’ouvrage de E. Minkowski, Le temps vécu)

Background (from www.Freud2Lacan.com)

Eugène (Eugeniusz) Minkowski (1885 –1972) was born of Jewish parents in St. Petersburg, went to school in Warsaw and studied medicine in Munich. He was persuaded to take up psychiatry by his wife, Françoise Minkowska‐Brokman, who was also to become a psychiatrist, and visited Bleuler in Zürich just before the First World War. The outbreak of World War I forced them to retreat to Zürich where Eugène and his wife both became assistants to Eugen Bleuler at the Burghölzli. He was known for his incorporation of phenomenology into psychopathology and for exploring the notion of “lived time”[temps vécu]. A student of Eugen Bleuler, he was also associated with the work of Ludwig Binswanger and Henri Ey. He was influenced by the 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 (“generating disorder”) as he thought that it consists in a loss of “vital contact with reality” and shows itself as autism. He influenced Henri Ey, R.D. Laing, and Maurice Merleau‐Ponty. Lacan cites one book and two articles of Minkowski in the bibliography of his doctoral thesis.

Eugène Minkowski’s Le Temps vécu: études phénoménologiques et psychopathologiques, Paris: D’Artrey, 1933 (Lived Time, Evanston, IL.:Northwestern University Press, 1970) articulates a phenomenology of time that is as inspired by the philosophical writings of Henri Bergson and Edmund Husserl as it is by the psychiatric descriptions of Eugen Bleuler. After providing a phenomenological description of the experience of time in normal life, Minkowski considers a number of mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, manic depression, and dementia, and he attempts to show that these pathological cases can be characterized in terms of a distortion of lived time and space.

Citation

p252 of Troisième Rapport – Contribution à l’étude des phobies : probably September 1955 (Paris) : Jean Mallet : Check this site /5 Other Authors A-Z (Mallet), from January 2024 http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12878, or https://web.archive.org/web/20210919001430/http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=12878 De la série phobique que nous venons d’envisager et qui comprend, rappelons-le, l’angoisse dans la nuit, la phobie des plages obscures, la phobie des espaces dissimulés, et enfin la phobie de l’espace derrière soi, le premier terme est, dans certains cas, neutralisé assez tôt, et de la manière suivante. Par une sorte de réalisation hallucinatoire, l’enfant confère à la nuit dans laquelle il se trouve plongé une matérialité d‘« enveloppe », « palpable », « pénétrante » et « vivante ». E. Minkowski a donné la description de ce phénomène tel qu’il est éprouvé par l’adulte (1). [(1) E. Minkowski, Vers une psychopathologie de l’espace, Le temps vécu, p. 372. See On the work of Eugène Minkowski, Le temps vécu (lived time) : 1935 : Jacques Lacan/ this post] … Après l’angoisse dans la nuit et la phobie des zones obscures, une deuxième série phobique fait son apparition.

Julia Evans2023-04-04T14:01:35+01:00