ABSTRACT
When some forty-five years ago Freud (1913) wrote for the first time about the philosophical interest in analysis, his main point was that philosophy could not avoid taking fully into account what he then called "the hypothesis of unconscious mental activities ." He also mentioned that philosophers may be interested in the interpretation of philosophical thought in terms of psychoanalysis - adding, though, here as elsewhere, that the fact that a theory or doctrine is determined by psychological processes of many kinds does not necessarily invalidate its scientific truth. Since then, the knowledge of human behavior and motivation we owe to analysis has greatly increased , has become much more comprehensive but also more specific; and this development has certainly influenced not only social science, anthropology, and medicine , but also philosophy in a broad sense . This does not, though, necessarily mean that analysis can "answer" what one usually calls philosophical problems; it usually means that it leads to looking at them from a new angle . Some of its potentialities in this respect have been made use of only rather scantily so far. I am thinking, for example, of its possible contribution toward a better understanding of ethical problems . The interest psychoanalysis may have for philosophers has clearly two aspects: it resides partly in the new psychological findings and the-
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ories of analysis, but also in certain questions of methodology raised by Freud's and other psychoanalysts' approach to the study of man.
