The authors analyzed a debate organized by the journal 'Brain and Behavioral Sciences' in which Grünbaum presented his theses about the scientific status of psychoanalysis. Grünbaum's critics can be classified into four groups according to the argumentative attitude they adopted: the contentious group (those who do not acknowledge Grünbaum's assumptions), the judicious group (those who argue with Grünbaum), the mediation group (those who neither agree nor disagree), and the irrelevant group (those who adopt a non-relevant point of view). All the speech figures and discourse elements of all the contributions were analysed in order to find differences between the four groups as to their use of these devices. Metaphorical expressions relating to war and (or) to legal matters were widely used throughout the debate. They were fairly equally distributed over the four groups and they served a polemical goal. (Adapted from Jaap Bos and Robert Maier)