Eugène (Eugeniusz) Minkowski (; 17 April 1885 – 17 November 1972) was a French psychiatrist of Jewish Polish origin, known for his incorporation of phenomenology into psychopathology and for exploring the notion of "lived time". A student of Eugen Bleuler, he was also associated with the work of Ludwig Binswanger and Henri Ey. He was influenced by 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" ("generative disturbance"), which he thought consists in a loss of "vital contact with reality" and shows itself as autism. Life and career Minkowski was born in Saint Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire, into a Jewish Polish family. He was second of the four sons of August Minkowski, a Warsaw banker and his wife, Tekla, née Lichtenbaum. When he was 7 years old, the family returned to the Polish capital, where he attended school and started his medical studies at the Imperial University of Warsaw. However, because of political repression from the czarist government, the university was temporarily closed in 1905. He was obliged to continue his studies at Breslau University (3 semesters), at Göttingen University (2 semesters) and finally, at Munich University (3 semesters) where he obtained his medical degree in 1909. As a Russian subject, he went on to practice medicine in Kazan to obtain Russian certification, and while there met his future wife, Franciszka Brokman, also a doctor and later known as 'Françoise'. They married in 1913. The couple settled in Munich, where Françoise pursued further work in psychiatry while Eugène took up the study of mathematics and philosophy, attending lectures by Alexander Pfänder and Moritz Geiger, pupils of Edmund Husserl. In Munich he became acquainted with Germanic philosophy. The outbreak of World War I forced them to seek refuge in Zürich with Minkowski's brother, Mieczysław (Michel). There, Minkowski and his wife both became assistants to Eugen Bleuler at the Burghölzli, a university clinic where Carl Gustav Jung and Ludwig Binswanger had practised earlier. In 1914 he finished a work entitled "Les éléments essentiels du temps-qualité" – "The Essential Elements of Time-Quality". At the beginning of the World War I Minkowski volunteered in the French Army