I mean, as discipline psychoanalysis is essentially dead in the water and has been since before Anna Freud even died her well-deserved death, may she rot in piss.

Whereas psychology as a discipline has greatly expanded and is extremely dynamic and it has analytical and descriptive power that outclasses psychoanalysis in all respects.

I don’t think that anyone but the most avid psychoanalist would argue that psychology is on par with or somehow inferior to psychoanalysis. My point was more about how in terms of outcomes for patients, you’d assume that psychology would have completely surpassed psychoanalysis given that it isn’t based on crackpot nonsense but rather it draws on, what, like a solid century of genuinely scientific endeavour and application. But that’s not the case - for all the advancements that psychology has made, and they are massive, in some ways it still seems to be stuck achieving outcomes on a rough par with the Austrian School of Sex Wizards and Oneiromancy.

Basically: Wrong ideas -> Wrong conclusions -> Respectable outcomes

vs

Good ideas -> Good conclusions -> Respectable outcomes

Which is just to say that something can be extremely flawed and yet still be useful. I wouldn’t encourage anyone to approach Freud without very healthy skepticism but that also applies for plenty of other things too and even if its foundations are false, its analysis is false, and its conclusions are false doesn’t mean that it is devoid of anything useful. All it means is that you’re going to have to separate out the wheat from the chaff and the ratio of wheat:chaff is going to be much less than desirable.