Modernity Psychosis: The Evolutionary Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Eli Sagan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Eli Sagan’s work rests on the assumption that psychoanalytic theory can be enormously useful in understanding society, provided that theory is used in a critical and non-reductionist manner. Robert Bellah writes of Sagan’s The Lust to Annihilate: A Psychoanalytic Study of Violence in Ancient Greek Culture (1979), “Not since E.R. Dodds’ The Greeks and the Irrational has anyone made so major a contribution to the understanding of the development of Greek moral ideas.” Dorothy Dinnerstein wrote of Sagan’s At the Dawn of Tyranny (1985), “This is a wonderfully original and incisive book—a book with profound bearing upon the psychology and politics that now threaten a sudden end to life on earth.” Karl Menninger wrote: “Eli Sagan gives us deep insights and profound thoughts relevant to our imminent self-destruction.” In addition to his many intellectual achievements, Eli has been active in national U.S. politics and even holds the distinction of having been listed twice on the John Dean/Richard Nixon “Enemies List.” This essay is a summary of presentations given by Eli Sagan and me on September 12, 2012—sponsored by the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society and co-sponsored by the Psychohistory Forum.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".