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.
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.
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.
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 France Minkowski came under the influence of the famous French philosopher Henri Bergson, who critiqued standard scientific views of time and of life.
The family moved again to Paris permanently and Minkowski returned to medicine and partially abandoned his philosophical pursuits.
[7] Original works and critical studies in the journal have been made by messieurs R. Allendy, A. Borel, A. Ceillier, H. Claude, H. Codet, J. Damourette, A. Hesnard, R. Laforgue, Mme F. Minkowska, E. Minkowski, É Pichon, Robin, R. de Saussure, Schiff and J.
[7] In 1926 he wrote a doctoral thesis on ""La notion de perte de contact avec la réalité et ses applications en psychopathologie"" – The Notion of Loss of Contact with Reality and its Applications in Psychopathology, which was based on the works of Henri Bergson and Eugen Bleuler, and began work at Sainte-Anne's Psychiatric Hospital, a leading mental hospital in Paris.
In truth, he claimed that a typical schizophrenic patient has the "poor autism", which he characterized by the poverty of affective and cognitive processes.
Minkowski claimed that "rich autism" happened only when a schizophrenic patient was equipped with an autism-independent inclination toward affective and cognitive expressivity.
In 1946 he gave one of the first Basel lectures on psychological suffering during Nazi persecution and went on to testify as an expert witness in numerous subsequent lawsuits.
He was also attracted by the practice of the Swiss psychiatrist, Eugen Bleuler and attempted to synthesize ideas from psychiatry with philosophy, taking an approach similar to Karl Jaspers.
Minkowski's first research into the psychopathology of schizophrenia was inspired by Bergson and appeared in his 1927 work La Schizophrénie, which he thought was "due to a deficiency of intuition, a sense of time and to a progressive hypertrophy of the grasp of spatial factors".
[10] Based on his dissertation, he considered that schizophrenic patients display a "loss of vital contact with reality" unlike others who experienced life as a "lived synchronism" or what he called "syntony", a notion borrowed from Ernst Kretschmer.