ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to clarify historically the idea of the third in philosophy and in psychoanalysis. The exposition suggests an agreement and differences between the various philosophical thirds and the psychoanalytic thirds found in the issue. The cornerstone of Rene Descartes' systematic doubt is the idea of an all-powerful Malignant Deceiver. This idea permitted Descartes to take up a reflective third position that in turn enabled him to conceive of the possibility that his experience was irreducibly subjective—that he was alone with, and encased in, his sense-experience, memories, feelings, and thoughts. The Kantian third is made up of the reflexivity of consciousness and the categorical conditions it imposes on knowledge. Psychoanalysts who espouse theories in which relations are prioritized over individuals, and who claim that the failure to give primacy to relations results in an untenable one-person psychology, can find some support for their views in C. Peirce.
