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More than a hundred years after the birth of psychoanalysis, we find that, rather than creating a well-defined object of study and an unequivocal practice, subsequent developments in the field have increasingly moved away from this goal. Manifold schools have emerged that may be grouped according to two basic positions, namely, the one that places something like the scientific method at the core of its endeavor, and the one that does the same with something like the hermeneutic model. I say something like because neither position fully corresponds to these two methods. The object of psychoanalysis transcends empirical observation and mere interpretation. Attempts to define its identity from either perspective have failed.
The work of Grünbaum inquired precisely into these different approaches. He strived to characterize the Freudian method as strictly scientific in comparison with other orientations, such as Paul Ricoeur's, which belongs on the side of hermeneutics. Grünbaum never aspired to harmonize both positions; he always advocated a scientific psychoanalysis, whose epistemological failings were easier to identify. Nevertheless, the challenge of constructing an epistemologically specific psychoanalysis, and hence a new object transcending both fields (that of the natural sciences and that of the social sciences), remains unresolved. This difficulty, however, does not prevent some of us from trying.
While psychoanalysis is neither a positive nor a hermeneutic science, it feeds from both methods in order to devise methodologies and theoretical models that increase, at best, its specific knowledge. For example, there have been various efforts to incorporate empirical observation so as to produce knowledge beyond the psychoanalytic setting. Among these efforts is the work carried out by Daniel Stern, Peter Fonagy, and others, in short, by the IPA's Research Committee, created in 1990 under the direction of Robert Wallerstein.
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