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

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.