Two possible objections to the preceding post:

"Psychoanalysis works for me; the results are confirmed in my interpretations"

"PA has a cultural influence in 20th century culture. I need to know about it to study the literature of this period."

"There is no other system of thought dealing with the recesses of the human psyche; PA is simply the best we have so far."

The first objection is easy to deal with: all critical approaches are self-confirming. You want to find castration anxiety, you will find it.

The second I agree with completely. You can't understand Hitchcock without Freud, because Hitchcock was influenced by this theory.

The third has some merit. However, those who sincerely believes this should take a critical look and throw out those parts of the theory that are least tenable. They would be left, I predict, with a vague psychological theory that owes very little to the specifics of Freudian concepts. They might also come to see that the way in which PA thought evolved slowed advances in psychology by holding on to dogmatism.