Also, if you're defining "successful" as "people keep turning up and paying" - that's not a successful practice. Or rather - it's not a successful practice for the patients.

Psychoanalysis is a small and largely discredited school of psychotherapy and counselling. It overlaps to some extent with psychiatry.  

The latter fields have developed a good repertory of models and techniques, some of which actually do work - at least as reliably as it's possible for a treatment modality to work when you're working with people who are psychologically and emotionally damaged.

Psychoanalysis has been proven not to work. Psychoanalysts avoid patient outcome studies like vampires avoid daylight - because whenever anyone checks outcomes honestly, psychoanalysis is either ineffective or harmful. At best it can do some good because a few talented individuals have good insights, emotional stability and empathic skills.

Unfortunately none of these qualities are considered essential for analysts. Being able to parrot jargon is. E.g.

Within language, the subject vainly tries to represent itself. The subject is an effect of the signifier, put into language. Language becomes a mask to disguise the impossibility of desire. The unconscious is less something inside the person as an 'intersubjective' space between people. According to Lacan, 'the unconscious is structured like language.' [No it isn't - Ed.]

Lacan sees the child not as the agent of symbolization but as the recipient of desire from an Other (the Mother). When the child plays with things disappearing and finding them again, they are recreating the missing mother. [Huh? - Ed.]

There are no sexual relations: [What? - Ed] there is just the individual's relation to the Law and to language, which allow for the continuance of social relationships.

Lacanian psychoanalysis thus focuses on deconstructing the narcissistic illusions of the self, allowing the childhood fragmentation and lack of unity of the self to resurface.[Uh oh... Ed]

Now - anyone familiar with cults is going to notice something immediately, in that last sentence: all cult leaders use the same MO, which is a deliberate attempt to regress and fragment their victims' sense of self.

It's possible with skill to do this and put people back together again. But unless I've missed something, this isn't considered a valid goal in Lacanian "psychoanalysis."

In practice this kind of abuse creates dependency on therapist, and keeps victims returning. I doubt Lacan was sophisticated enough to understand this, or empathic enough to care about it if he did.

But it's clear to anyone who does know something about therapy that the only possible effect of this kind of "analysis" is further breakage.

So of course his patients suicided. This shouldn't be a surprise. It is a surprise that it's possible for adults to pretend that this is somehow irrelevant, and like, oh well, whatever.

So - psychoanalysis does not mean character analysis. Any good writer, and even a few bad writers, can tell you more about real character psychology than psychoanalysis can.

The kind of cultural analysis that you're talking about uses the language of psychoanalysis, but really it seems to be a ritualistic mashup of certain key ideas and phrases, some of which are Freudian, some of which are post-Freudian, but none of which have been peer reviewed or tested objectively.

It's a kind of philosophical Tourette's where everyone repeats the same just-so stories over and over, because knowing the words and the jargon is the badge of admission needed to join the club of special people.

But it's a useless hobby. As a form of political engagement, it's been an utter failure. As effective therapy, it's been an utter failure. It's even questionable how influential it's been creatively.

So - what is it for, except for academic egotism and self-importance? It's noisy and dense but doesn't really explain or predict anything. It doesn't help people - it actually harms them. And with the rest of Critical Theory, it has seduced the academic left into a mindless half-century of mooing wordy digression while the right has run rings around it, politically and economically.

It makes for the odd interesting film review, but that seems to be about the extent of it.

Really - why should anyone who isn't planning to join the club care about it?