Freud viewed the mind as an iceberg: the seen part of the iceberg was what we consciously think, feel and talk about; the rest under the water was our subconscious. He also believed that our present day problems stemmed from the past events. And what happened in our childhood affects our subconscious. Hence he based psychoanalysis, the treatment method he invented, on these principles: psychological issues are derived from repressed emotions and events.
In the actual treatment, the psychoanalyst accumulates information to work with from the patient by free associations, transference, dream interpretations, slips and parapraxes. Then he forms hypotheses based on his observations and by confronting patient’s pathological feeling; once the patients accept these hypotheses then they are assumed to be cured.
The assessment period, so the testing, of psychoanalysis is done in a clandestine manner while the analyst is gathering information. Based on this assessment, the analyst has a conclusion. BUT there are no interpretive rules or regulations, so there is no way of even knowing whether the repressed memories are actual or imagined memories. There is no valid method of accessing those memories, so no valid method of evaluating the validity or the reliability of this assessment method. In order to impede this (even though it is not enough) the analysts should be extremely sensitized to suggestion during their training, so they do not bring their own bias into the picture.
The hypotheses generated by the analyst are predictions of hidden psychological states, and this repression is not testable because of the lack of manifested behavior. Absence of empirical evidence causes this testing method to rely on therapeutic and clinical observation. One way to ensure validity of assessment methods is to closely inspect the transcripts of the sessions. However since there are no rules, the line between the theories and observations is going to be blurry and it is going to stay extremely subjective. Thus inter rater reliability is going to be low.
All in all, like all science, psychoanalysis is a science too because it is a good theory, and is falsifiable (which is important in a theory). More importantly it induces many other theories and ideas, which in the future can lead to many more hypotheses and theories. Nevertheless, without certain rules and overt behavior regulations it remains hard to be testable.
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