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Before turning to the volume under review, I would like to situate the '[the] renaissance of Freud studies' (p. 3), of which it is a part, in its larger historical and theoretical context. Two of the great 'masters of suspicion' (Ricoeur, 1970, p. 33) Marx and Freud, sought to unmask the ilusory nature of our various mental products, e.g. morality, religion, art etc., by explaining their manifest content in terms of a more fundamental substratum, i.e. material conditions and drive-related wishes. They did not, however, turn the weapons of suspicion against themselves. (The third master of suspicion, Nietzsche, did make such a move, and, in this respect, fundamentally differs from the other two.) Marx and Freud remained relatively confident, if not somewhat complacent, about the validity of the sciences they employed to conduct their critiques of illusion, and never attempted to subject their own standpoints, which of course were themselves products of the mind, to systematic critique.
However, this sort of 'radicalized critique of reason' (Habermas, 1987, p. 302), which has become '[suspicious] of the masters of suspicion' (Rorty, 1985, p. 161), and attempts to debunk them with their own critical weapons, has become prevalent today. It can be observed in the various forms of 'postmodern' philosophy (e.g. Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Winch, Rorty and Feyerabend), which has become deeply sceptical about the foundations of Western rationality and science, and, at times, in the new philosophy and history of science as well. Because he is both a major figure in the history of Western science and, at the same time, a master of suspicion, Freud is an inviting target for debunking critique. The aim is to show that Freud's rationalism cannot be maintained against the consequences of his own discovery of the unconscious; his own discovery, in other words, threatens to swamp the very scientific ground from which it was made.
The Kantian tradition in the philosophy of scien