in 1972. His funeral was attended by a large crowd, including his psychiatrist friend and collaborator, Henri Ey. Philosophy and psychopathology Philosophically, Minkowski was influenced by Bergson and the phenomenologist Max Scheler, who had developed separate accounts of Time, (see 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 named as vital energy, an account of the essence of time. He was also attracted by the practice of the Swiss psychiatrist, Eugen Bleuler and attempted to synthesize ideas from psychiatry with philosophy, taking an approach similar to Karl Jaspers. He introduced phenomenology as part of his investigations into psychopathology. He sought thereby to explain the experience of patients who appeared to suffer from distortions of time and/or space. Minkowski's first research into the psychopathology of schizophrenia was inspired by Bergson and appeared in his 1927 work La Schizophrénie, which he thought was "due to a deficiency of intuition, a sense of time and to a progressive hypertrophy of the grasp of spatial factors". Based on his dissertation, he considered that schizophrenic patients display a "loss of vital contact with reality" unlike others who experienced life as a "lived synchronism" or what he called "syntony", a notion borrowed from Ernst Kretschmer. 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. He was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Zurich in 1955 and the University of Warsaw in 1965. Major works in French La Notion de perte contact vital avec la réalité et ses applications en psychopathologie (Paris: Jouve, 1926) La schizophrénie: Psychopathologie des schizoïdes et des schizophrènes (Paris: Payot, 1927). 2nd, revised and augmented, edition (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1953). Le Temps vécu. Étude phénoménologique et psychopathologiques (Paris: D'Artrey, 1933) Vers une cosmologie. Fragments philosophiques, (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1936) Traité de psychopathologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968) Au-delà du rationalisme morbide (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2000) Écrits cliniques, (Eres, 2002) Articles