system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is psychoanalysis supposed to be predictive?

I'm taking a class on Freud and Lacan next semester, and I've been pretty confused about psychoanalysis as a discipline in general. I understand that it's different from psychology, and that it has to be read in a clinical context etc., but it still seems to me that there is a basic question of whether what psychoanalysts like Freud and Lacan described is 'correct'. 

For example: both discuss the Oedipus complex (though in very different ways), but the question I have after reading about it is, 'okay, so does this actually happen?' It's the same thing with the mirror stage in Lacan: is the sense of one's 'self' developed through, for example, something seen? And in the paper on the mirror stage Lacan even references empirical studies, suggesting to me that he's really trying to get at the truth of childhood development. But in other places he says what he's doing is *specifically not* developmental psychology! 

I suppose I'm confused about what one is supposed to take away from psychoanalysis in terms of how it correlates to reality. Freud believed he was describing the structures of the human mind correctly, and I think Lacan did too: that is, he truly believed our unconscious minds are 'structured like a language' and so on. But is it? How could we ever know?
gpt
Do you mean predictive in terms of behaviour? If that is the case then no, that is not the purpose of the discipline. 

Usually psychotherapy is used as an exploratory tool used in the setting of the relationship between the patient and the therapist with the goal of uncovering the patient's relationship with the world. In a sense you're not after what is objectively real in that relationship, but what is subjectively real for the patient and how he navigates his mental landscape. Both Freud and Lacan put forward a vocabulary and some methodology that made that navigation a bit easier and primed the therapist to recognise certain patterns.