Psychoanalysts, for most of their history, have relied on the clinical case report as the chief method of evaluating the efficacy of treatment. In comparison, brief psychotherapy approaches such as behavior therapy and cognitive therapy have shown much more concern for empirical validation from broad-based studies modeled after randomized pharmaceutical trials. (see, e.g., Morley and al. 1999).

At least in the United States, psychoanalysis has usually been perceived as a form of insight-based therapy, with the goal of bringing unconscious thoughts or memories into consciousness. Some studies, however, throw doubt on whether insight is a necessary or sufficient means for improving a person's behavior or increasing their level of functioning (Fisher & Greenberg, 1977, pp411-412).

There is even a great controversy among psychologists as to whether repressed memories actually exist. The whole recovered memory movement, which has flourished in the United States in the last decade, is now highly criticized by the advocates of the false memory syndrome (Loftus & Ketcham, 1994).

Psychoanalysts have often complained about the significant lack of theoretical agreement among analysts of different schools. Many authors have attempted to integrate the various theories, with limited success.

The philosopher Jacques Derrida Derrida used psychoanalytic theory to question what he called the metaphysics of presence, a body of philosophical theory which assumes that the meaning of utterances can be pinned down and made fully evident.

Psychoanalysis, or at least the dominant version of it, has been denounced as patriarchal or phallocentric by proponents of feminist theory.

A few of the most influential psychoanalysts are/were Karen Horney, Jacob Arlow, John Benjamin, Wilfred Bion, Charles Brenner, Erik Erikson, Ronald Fairbairn, Sandor Ferenczi, Sigmund Freud, Merton Gill, Andre Green, Heinz Hartmann, Carl Jung, Otto Kernberg, Melanie Klein, Heinz Kohut, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Hans Loewald, Margaret Mahler, Donald Meltzer, Stephen A. Mitchell, David Rapaport, Roy Schafer, Daniel N. Stern, Neville Symington, Donald Winnicott, Theodor Reik, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Slavoj Zizek.