Intuition in Minkowski: Method and Lived Experience

Abstract

In Introduction to Metaphysics (1903) Bergson suggests thinking intuition as a method that is positioned, by means of a simple and immediate act, within the scope of knowledge. The Franco-German psychiatrist Eugene Minkowski ( The Schizophrenie , 1927) echoes this distinction by sustaining that psychiatric diagnosis should be able to penetrate, as intuition does, into psychic states of the individual suffering from a morbid condition (diagnosis by penetration). Minkowski adds to the dimension of intuition as a method, the concept that intuition defines the space-time structures within the psychotic lived experience ( Les temps vecu , 1933). Thus, intuition, which determines the position of a subject in the world, by means of adopting particular characteristics (fixation or excessive dynamism, morbid geometrism, etc.), provides elements to identify the presence of psychosis. In this sense, the definition of schizophrenia as a loss of vital contact with reality (concept of autism), results from a rigorous study of the structures that define the architecture of intuition in the psychotic subject. Our presentation aims at identifying the double importance suggested by Minkowski to the concept of intuition, as it represents a method of knowledge and, at the same time, as a fundamental element in the structure of the lived experience of a subject.