Article Collaboration and Improvement DriveThis article was on the Article Collaboration and Improvement Drive for the week of October 17, 2007.

Kant

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In light of the reasoning behind this revert, namely that no new conclusions may be constructed, I present the two quotations to which my edit refers:

The first comes from An Outline of Psychoanalysis (page 67, Collected Works, Volume 17):"Psychoanalysis makes a basic assumption whose discussion is reserved for philosophical thinking, but whose justification lies in its results. We know two things about what we call our psyche (soul life): firstly, the physical organ and seat of the psyche, the brain (nervous system), and secondly, our acts of consciousness, which are immediately given and cannot be brought closer to us by any description. (...) There is no direct relationship between the two endpoints of our knowledge. If there were, it would at most provide a precise localisation of the processes of consciousness and contribute nothing to our understanding of them." Everything Freud writes here (summarised in the term ‘endpoints’ – along with the statement that they are ‘immediately given’) is what Kant's ‘a priori’ means.

The difficulty lies in the fact that Freud here does not explicitly refer to Kant. He merely explains that the discussion of acts of consciousness and corporeality (in the sense of two unconditional given endpoints) is reserved for philosophical thinking. That Freud dealt specifically with Kant's a priori in the context of consciousness and physicality follows above all from this second quotation: ‘Replace Kant's a priori with the conditions of the psychic apparatus.’ (Collected Works (in German). Vol. XVII (5th ed.). London. Editorial: Imago Publishing: Anna Freud. p. 152.) My mistake was not to have referred to the first of the quotations in my edit, because without this, the impression of a prohibited construction of new conclusions does indeed arise. I hope that it has now become clear that this is not the case, but please provide a critical statement to be on the safe side. L'durre vital (talk) 10:40, 9 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Your edits are not constructive. You may combine facts from multiple reliable sources, but you must not combine them in a way that implies a new conclusion that no single source makes (that would be prohibited "original research by synthesis," or WP:SYNTH). --Omnipaedista (talk) 18:48, 11 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]