Eugene Minkowski is one of the prominent phenomenological psychiatrists in the 20th Century. His work remains to be inspiring to the contemporary psychiatry and philosophy. As mental diseases have become one of the most debilitating, costly and intractable diseases, Minkowski’s idea in phenomenological psychiatry and his clinical technique have not only a historical meaning, but also an important significance for practice. According to Minkowski, mental diseases are not isolated disorders of the brain, but abnormal modes of human’s being-in-the-world. Besides, I am not a brain, though my brain is an interface between me and world. Schizophrenia patients do not suffer from the loss of high mental abilities, but have excessive mental abilities. Minsowski discovered phenomenology in his medical studies. It was Henry Bergson and Max Scheler who first gave phenomenological thinking to Minkowski. He had considerable personal contact with Bergson while he was a doctor in France. When he was coping with melancholic patients, he found the distortion of patient’s sense of time. It was this discovery that showed him the relevance of phenomenology of time. This discovery also led to his first phenomenological study and one of his most influential book Lived Time. Moreover, Minkowski found that natural sciences not only detach themselves from the real origin of life, but also cover it. This philosophical insight coincided with Edmund Husserl's anti-naturalism. Therefore, he regarded phenomenology as the foremost method to explore mental diseases. Unlike most phenomenological psychiatrists (Ludwig Binswanger, Wolfgang Blankenburg, Medard Boss and others), he didn't cite Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger frequently. Binswanger devoted himself as a student of phenomenological philosophy, but Minkowski only regarded phenomenology as an inspiration of his medical practice and study. He developed phenomenology in his own style. In fact, Minkowski’s concepts and practice of phenomenology do offer us a closer contact with reality and show us how to do phenomenology. His phenomenology is a science of studying the essential phenomena of mental diseases. It is very close to Karl Jaspers' phenomenology, but a little far from Husserl's. Husserl's phenomenology focuses on the essential phenomena (possibility or construction of individual conscious experiences), but Minkowski's phenomenology focuses on the empirical phenomena, especially phenomena of mental diseases. Jaspers has developed his phenomenology in the first chapter of his General Psychopathology. To Minkowski, Jaspers’ phenomenology is not enough. Minkowski claimed that we needed essential analysis to grasp the basic trouble. One central concern of Minkowski is schizophrenia. He claims that the basic disorder of schizophrenia is the loss of vital contact with reality. This notion is not only influenced by Bergson's phenomenology, but also similar to Husserl’s philosophy of the live world and Heidegger's thought of being-in-the-world. A patient with schizophrenia is one who has been separated from the common world, so schizophrenia always appears as autism. The two forms of autism are rough autism and poor autism. Patients with rough autism have partial contact with reality, but illusion has taken the place of reality. In his opinion, it is poor autism that is the more original one. In poor autism caused by the decay of personal impulse, patients have lost contact with reality completely. The characteristics of poor autism are the interrogative attitude, morbid rationalism and the dominance of static and geometrical factors. Minkowski is not a phenomenologist in the theoretical sense, but really a phenomenologist in the practical sense. His studies of melancholia, schizophrenia and autism and so on go back to the phenomena of live experience. It coincides of Husserl’s motto “returning to facts” and philosophy of the live world. Minkowski’s phenomenology is not pure phenomenology but applied phenomenology. He has showed us how to convert phenomenology from theory to practice. Therefore, he is far from the texts of Husserl and Heidegger, but very close to their spirits. One of the most important problems raised by Minkowski is whether phenomenology can bring enough insight to the preconscious level where mental diseases arise. He holds that phenomenological intuition has access to this level. However, as Iso Kern has pointed out, phenomenological intuition can’t arrive at the deep conscious, while Yogacara Buddhism has much clearer and deeper understanding of the occurring and the conducts of the preconscious or the deep conscious than phenomenology. In the future development of phenomenological psychiatry, ideas from Yogacara Buddhism may have special values. We suggest that phenomenological psychiatry should be transformed into Yogacara psychiatry. The source of mental diseases is the deepest conscious, i.e. Alaya-consciousness.