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I've heard Continental Philosophy described as the attempt to reconcile Freud and Marx.
I think the appeal is that both of them describe how people are shaped by their environment, thus implying that intelligent control of the environment could allow shaping of people, which is an incredibly seductive idea even if most people won't admit it. The contradiction is that Freud says that people are shaped by their families and social circles, and Marx says that people are shaped by their socio-economic class and the economic structure of society.
I mean, both Freud and Marx are certainly very central and influential figures in continental philosophy. You might even be able to say that the project (or one of the projects) of the Frankfurt school was reconciling Freud and Marx. But it would be wrong to describe all of continental philosophy that way. There are continental thinkers who make little reference to either of them. It also doesn't cover the historical figures like Hegel and Schopenhauer who were retroactively declared to be "continental" and who were writing before Marx!
Really the best definition of continental is "European philosophy that's not analytic". Bertrand Russell and some co-conspirators decided that philosophy needed a reboot in the early 20th century, largely on account of his passionate rejection of Hegel, and that's the project that eventually grew into analytic philosophy. So maybe you could also define continental as "someone who thinks Hegel isn't total nonsense and deserves at least some kind of response" (but even that's not a perfect definition, because Hegel and Heidegger, two of the biggest villains for the early analytics, are receiving increasing attention from analytics today).
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Yeah, as I'm reading about it now that sounds right. To be more specific it was this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eros_and_Civilization which really argued the idea, and it got popularized by the Frankfurt school and spread through all of the postmodern academic humanities. What a trip.
I think I got it from "The Modern Mind" by Peter Watson, an "intellectual history of the 20th century":
https://archive.org/details/modernmindintell00wats
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