In his dissertation 'On time and time-forms', the Dutch Psychiatrist Paul Theodoor Hugenholtz (1903-1987) developed an anthropology and psychopathology based on time-experience. Hugenholtz' dissertation builds on the work on time of anthropological and phenomenological psychiatrists: Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966), eugène minkowski (1885-1972), Viktor emil von Gebsattel (1883-1976) and erwin Straus (1891-1975). Their anthropological psychiatric work on time should be interpreted in the context of a 'new' psychiatry of the early twentieth century, the rise of holistic science and a broad cultural, philosophical and scientific reappraisal of time. The time debate shows a reconsideration of psychiatry in which methodology, epistemology, values and the understanding of time mutually influenced each other between 1910 and 1939. This type of psychiatry should be studied as a cultural phenomenon, without losing sight of the psychiatric aspirations of its practitioners. With the cultural historical perspective it can be understood as a psychiatric reflection on the relationship between timeexperience and the meaning of human existence in a modern world.