Lived time

phenomenological and psychopathological studies

Eugène Minkowski

Translated by Nancy Metzel

Eugène Minkowski’s Lived Time 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.