Review of Matthew C. Altman and Cynthia D. Coe, The Fractured Self in Freud and German Philosophy . London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013. 247 pages
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Freud's metapsychology is a product of post-Enlightenment thinking.This is the upshot of Altman and Coe's well-researched The Fractured Self in Freud and German Philosophy.To get to this conclusion, Altman and Coe examine Freud's relationship with major German thinkers of the 19 th century.Despite Freud's own claim that metapsychology is a science, not a philosophy (3), Altman and Coe's examination reveals the philosophical underpinnings of an otherwise positivistic and methodologically individualistic program of psychoanalysis.This underpinning turns out to be both empirical (determinist) and autonomous (anti-determinist).Of course, Altman and Coe do not see this (as Freud might have) as a deficiency of intellectual rigour: rather as an acknowledgement of the intellectual history Freud subsumes as part of his metatheory generation.This puts Freud clearly in line with 19 th century post-Enlightenment thinking.And it places Freud in a line of scholars keen to test the boundaries of subjectivity as set by Enlightenment parameters.Freud's subject is "a fractured self-embodied, historically situated, and bound by language" (5).It is "an unfinished project" (5) that continues but does not imitate conclusions of post-Enlightenment German thought.In the interest of space, I will examine five of the nine thinkers through whom Altman and Coe read Freud; these are Kant, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Nietzsche.I will then discuss Altman and Coe's conclusions on having canvassed the tradition of 19 th century German philosophy.Kant's theory of freedom operates as the point of departure for Freudian analysis.Kant's freedom is notoriously dualistic; knowledge limits itself to make room for faith (10).Furthermore, self-knowledge is ultimately inscrutable: we don't have access to the (hidden) motivations of our hearts, and we don't have a mechanism to uncover these.We have the capacity to formulate moral maxims, but only to superimpose these onto our baser motivations, which remain inaccessible.Our empirical self is impenetrable, and our noumenal self is opaque (14).In contrast to this, Freud's self is empirical all the way down, and is motivated by (materialistic) drives ( 14).Through
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.012 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".