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by philosopher1234 1279 days ago
The very same Wikipedia article cited at the top of this thread includes links to several meta analyses demonstrating psychoanalysis’ effectiveness. The evidence is not conclusive, because it is apparently difficult to study psychoanalysis, but it falls on the side of it being effective.

Very far from discredited, as you seem to want to claim (with no evidence). Difficult to study != disproven

2 comments

I’m not claiming it is discredited, but you seem to think that it must be either discredited or proven.

My position is that the extended difficulty over the past hundred years in supporting it scientifically means it is in essence not a science. It is too complex to measure using these means and so science in pursuit of “proving the efficiency of psychiatric treatments” where psychiatric treatments are anything more than medications is largely a waste of time and effort, and will remain so until or unless we develop better methods of addressing complexity in a rigorous way.

That seems like a reasonable position to me. I’m mostly here because psychoanalysis gets an unfair rep. People say it’s not science or it’s discredited and they mean that it’s junk, but it is not junk, and there is no reason to think so.
I wonder what this person thinks of SSRIs if they think what they’ve shown proves that psychoanalysis is discredited
SSRIs were demonstrated using medical science. The study referenced here is hot garbage, and I’m not excited to spend my day digging for counterfactuals in meta-analyses of questionable science.

The reproducibility of the studies feeding into the meta analysis is less than 50/50. Why bother to perform a meta-analysis on noise? The fact that people do tells you a lot about the state of psychiatry as a science.