  In making cognitive interests explicit, Habermas also engages in a kind of critical self-reflection, more precisely a methodological reflection that aims to free science from its positivist illusions. Such reflection exemplifies the third cognitive interest, the emancipatory interest of reason in overcoming dogmatism, compulsion, and domination. For scientific expressions of this interest, he looked to Freudian psychology and a version of Marxist social theory. The status of the emancipatory interest, however, was problematic from the start, for it conflated two kinds of critical reflection. Whereas his critique of positivism and theory of cognitive interests involve reflective articulation of the formal structures of knowledge, Freudian and Marxist critique aim to unmask concrete cases of personal self-deception and social-political ideology (1973cd). Nor was it clear that psychoanalysis provided an apt model of liberatory reflection in any case, as critics pointed out how the asymmetries between patient and analyst could not represent the proper intersubjective form for emancipation. These and other deficits of his analysis posed a challenge for Habermas that would guide a decade-long search for the normative and empirical basis of critique. Whatever the best path to the epistemic and normative basis for critique might be, it would have to pass a democratic test: that “in Enlightenment there are only participants” (1973b, 44). Habermas will not resolve this methodological issue until a series of transitional studies in the 1970s culminates in his mature systematic work, The Theory of Communicative Action (1984a/1987; German ed., 1981; hereafter cited as TCA).