Minkowski Revisited: Glancing at the Clinical Core of Schizophrenic Vulnerability

[摘要] More than 80 years after his famous monograph on schizophrenia,1 some of the original intuitions of the French psychiatrist, born in Russia, Eugène Minkowski (1885-1972), seem to have regained proper appreciation in the field of continental psychopathology. This is the case for the clinical-phenomenological notions of “loss of vital contact with reality,” “morbid rationalism,” and “interrogative attitude,” which capture prototypical, encompassing features of schizophrenia that often antedate the emergence of behavioral symptoms (e.g., delusions, hallucinations, social withdrawal).2,3 Similarly, on a more theoretical level, Minkowski coined the expression le trouble générateur, or generative disorder, to indicate the underlying core of patients’ manifest symptoms—that is, an organizing principle that transcends the single symptomatic expressions and lends a sort of morphogenetic coherence to the whole clinical picture.2–4

[学科分类] 精神健康和精神病学