From an empirical perspective, the theories of psychotherapy are profoundly uninteresting. Debate has raged for decades about the dodo bird verdict - the hypothesis that all psychotherapies have equivalent outcomes - but the data has rendered that debate moot.
Psychotherapy is effective, but only marginally better than placebo. The differences in efficacy between various modes of psychotherapy are statistically insignificant and undoubtedly clinically insignificant. People receiving psychoanalysis improve at basically the same rate as people receiving CBT or IPT or ACT or a raft of other interventions that loosely resemble psychotherapy. In the most basic sense, it doesn't matter whether Freud was a genius or a fraud; entertaining his theories, even if only to criticise them, is a distraction at best.
The bottom line is that people tend to feel a bit better when they talk about their problems with someone who is attentive, supportive and non-judgemental. That's a valuable insight, but it's inherently limited and it's never going to yield the kind of treatments that we want and need.
Psychotherapy is effective, but only marginally better than placebo. The differences in efficacy between various modes of psychotherapy are statistically insignificant and undoubtedly clinically insignificant. People receiving psychoanalysis improve at basically the same rate as people receiving CBT or IPT or ACT or a raft of other interventions that loosely resemble psychotherapy. In the most basic sense, it doesn't matter whether Freud was a genius or a fraud; entertaining his theories, even if only to criticise them, is a distraction at best.
The bottom line is that people tend to feel a bit better when they talk about their problems with someone who is attentive, supportive and non-judgemental. That's a valuable insight, but it's inherently limited and it's never going to yield the kind of treatments that we want and need.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wps.20941