Description

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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.

First published in French in 1933 as Le temps vécu, this edition of this classic work of phenomenological psychiatry and psychopathology includes a new foreword by Dan Zahavi that presents some of Minkowski’s main ideas and discusses his contemporary relevance.

About the Author

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EUGÈNE MINKOWSKI (1885–1972) was a French psychiatrist known for his incorporation of phenomenology into psychopathology. He was the author of numerous articles and seven books, including La schizophrénie: Psychopathologie des schizoïdes et des schizophrènes (Schizophrenia: The Psychopathology of Schizoids and Schizophrenics) and Traité de psychopathologie (Treatise on Psychopathology).

DAN ZAHAVI is a professor of philosophy and the director of the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of more than eight books, including Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation, Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective, Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame, and Husserl’s Legacy.

Praise For…

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"Lived Time is without doubt one of the essential texts for anyone interested in the philosophy and psychopathology of time. An extraordinarily thoughtful and elegant writer in the Bergsonian tradition, Minkowski opens up philosophy to the extremes of temporal experience, those of the delusional, the schizophrenic, the child and the aged. A marvelous and captivating book!" —Elizabeth Grosz, author of Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power

“Together with Karl Jaspers and Ludwig Binswanger, Minkowski . . . counts as one of the early founders of and principal advocates for phenomenological psychiatry. . . . His work is firmly anchored in clinical observations, and his careful and detailed vignettes are among the treasures of the book.” —Dan Zahavi, from the foreword

“This is a smooth and sensitive translation of one of the French classics in psychology and phenomenology, which appeared first in 1933. . . . Minkowski’s descriptions manifest many interesting details and aspects of lived time.” 
—Robert Sokolowski