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In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Adolf Grünbaum's (1977; 1981; 1982) critique of psychoanalysis as a science was hotly contested (Edelson 1984). Although not claiming that psychoanalysis was ineffective, Grunbaum held that its successes were attributable to suggestion and the placebo effect—that is, to nonspecific treatment measures—rather than to the causal effect of psychoanalytic treatment. Grunbaum's basic challenge to psychoanalysis as a scientific discipline held that (1) psychoanalysis as a treatment was centrally predicated upon overcoming repression such that patient and analyst would agree on the contents uncovered—the so-called “tally argument”; and (2) that the data generated in the process of psychoanalysis could not be probative as these were (a) contaminated by suggestion, and (b) not subject to scientific test as the data were enumeratively inductive (i.e., here is another example bearing out X hypothesis) rather than eliminatively inductive (i.e., this result shows that X hypothesis cannot be correct, but Y hypothesis still stands).
There are two different sorts of answers to Grunbaum. As to his first claim, few contemporary psychoanalytic theorists hold that the central task in psychoanalysis is overcoming repression such that patient and analyst agree upon the reconstructed contents. To the extent that this aim is not central to