The Incomplete Bergson: Memory, Minkowski, and the Foundations of Phenomenological Psychiatry

Abstract

Abstract

Disturbances of temporality have long been central to phenomenological accounts of psychosis. Yet the conceptual resources used to frame these disturbances have been shaped—in specific ways—by Eugène Minkowski’s selective appropriation of Henri Bergson’s philosophy. This article reconstructs what was left unexplored in that inheritance: not a theoretical detail but something close to the heart of the matter—Bergson’s insistence that memory is not a layer added to perception but the very medium in which perception occurs. Drawing on Bergson’s Matter and Memory and Mind-Energy , and tracing the historical conditions under which Minkowski’s foundational synthesis left this dimension aside, the article suggests that the self-disorder tradition and desynchronisation accounts, for all their sophistication, have worked with a Bergson from whom a crucial dimension was missing—one whose recovery opens onto dimensions these frameworks have not yet fully explored: the memorial constitution of selfhood, the existential unbuilding that follows its dysregulation, the aha and anti-aha dialectic that characterises psychotic onset, and a recovery understood not as restoration but as re-temporalisation—the gradual reconstitution of the perception-memory-action synthesis through embodied and intersubjective re-engagement with the world.