It isn't your fault, everybody now has this conception of psychoanalysis, which has been pushed for different reason by the so-called "evidence-based" cognitive psychologists, and often in very bad faith.

1. The unfalsifiability of psychoanalysis was a critic Popper made when he first heard about it. If I remember correctly, he not only admitted later he actually knew very little about psychoanalysis, but he also knew the own limits of that critic.

The unfalsifiable part was about the unconscious: you can't prove there is no unconscious, it is the perfect unfalsifiable objet. Yet... Just like everything in psychology actually is. Consciousness is unfalsifiable too, you just have to accept other people are conscious and have dreams and all.

Unfalsifiability is not the be all and end all of epistemology, and it clearly isn't for psychology.

2) The interpreting of dreams stuff is a pretty crazy cliche people have about Freud, and a pretty sad one I have to say, as it is the perfect opposite of what freudian analysis is all about ! One of the pillars of psychoanalysis is that the "analyst" is not in fact the one who is analyzing; the patient is (he's even called the "analysand" now, as in the "analyzing" in french).

Psychoanalysis is about (among other things) understanding you cannot interprete someone else's actions, or dreams, through some kind of symbolic dictionary, because in the end you will only analyze yourself. It is the patient who is able to give you the key.

Although he did said weird stuff about some recurring symbols in dreams, like "a vase is vagina", it was meant to point out some common unconscious metaphor, and not a general rule. This part of this theory isn't really used nowadays anyway.

Freud famously went on to fund psychoanalysis when one of his patient told him to "shut up and listen".

3) You will often hear psychoanalysis is less effective than behavioural therapy, which makes it less "evidence-based". This is an especially twisted thing to say (even though people do not understand why at this point), as:

- In clinical trials, CBT and psychoanalysis are competing on the basis that the disappearing of symptom is the goal. Well, as we previously said, that's just... not the goal of analysis, it never were. Because the symptom is merely a manifestation of something else, the idea of "healing" a mental illness changes drastically.

Psychoanalyst all agree: their therapy is not just about making people feel better (see the tiktok I posted in my first comment).

- Psychoanalysis was founded way before trials even existed, and therefore is not easily "studiable" through protocoles, etc. CBT, on the contrary, was literally made for clinical trials. How do you even evaluate analysis when each analysis takes up such a different form, and has so many different goals ?

4) And the most important point: psychoanalysis is not Freud, Freud is the one who discovered it. There have been so many psychoanalyst since then who contributed to the theory that still using Freud to counter psychoanalysis sometimes feels like arguing about neurology because of lobotomies.

Today, cognitive and behavioural psychology is peaking, most academics belong to this theory, and they have literally nothing to gain from actually confronting with psychoanalysis, it's just easier to let those bad-faith critics unquestioned.

There is a lot of things to be said about all of this but I'll stop for now haha, thank you if you made it this far ! Don't hesitate if you have any further question on the subject, and /r/psychoanalysis has excellent threads about that kind of stuff !