ABSTRACT
This chapter confronts the first direction by which the assimilation of psychoanalytic doctrine to the metascientific framework of "analytic" epistemology has been attempted. Cartesian and Kantian theories of knowledge are the fountainhead of modern "analytic" epistemology. The chapter explores the notion of the psychoanalytic unconscious in this way unavoidably erases the repressed in favor of the merely unnoticed, making for a metatheoretical and metascientific regression to a pre-Freudian philosophy of consciousness. Within the frame of analytic epistemology, knowledge must either be subjectivistic, grounded in the knower's own consciousness, or objectivistic, deriving from a correspondence of the knower's representational activity with the there-being of things. The attempt to make the dynamic unconscious the object of naturalistic investigation coincides precisely with the ascendancy of an objectivistic "ego" epistemology in the prestigious tradition of ego psychology. Rene Descartes work emerges in opposition to the revival of skepticism in Renaissance thought.
