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Dr. Arnold David Richards, Training and Supervising Analyst at New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and former Editor of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and Dr. Arthur A. Lynch, Adjunct Professor at Columbia University School of Social Work, and Training and Supervising Analyst at the American Institute for Psychoanalysis, presented a paper examining the identity of psychoanalysis. The authors began by exploring the varying roles of science and hermeneutics in the discipline of psychoanalysis. On the one hand, Freud situated psychoanalysis in the context of the natural sciences, believing that the mind could be studied in the same way as the natural environment. On the other hand, Freud pointed out the connection between psychoanalysis and the human sciences, specifically the history of civilization, mythology, the psychology of religion, and the science of literature. This set the stage for a debate about psychoanalysis's identity, in which the tension between positivism and relativism is inherent.
In exploring this debate, the authors examined the challenge to positivism that was posed by the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure who approached the study of language in terms of tacit structures present at a single time in the history of language rather than being concerned with historical change. Saussure's ideas found their way into psychoanalysis via Lacan, who believed that the unconscious is also structured like a language, rather than being formed by past events. The authors situated Lacan's theories as a turning point in psychoanalysis, away from historicism and positivism. Another challenge to positivism came from the hermeneutic theory of , who emphasized the subjective role of the observer in understanding the past. Psychoanalytic thinkers have since grappled with the relationship between science, hermeneutics, and psychoanalysis. Ricoueur first advocated that psychoanalysis abandon its claim to scientific status and concede