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Review of Matthew C. Altman and Cynthia D. Coe, The Fractured Self in Freud and German Philosophy. London


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 19th century. Despite Freud’s own claim that metapsychology is a science, not a philosophy, 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 19th 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” 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 19th century Germanphilosophy.