How Effective is Psychotherapy in General? What about Psychodynamic Therapy?

In The Efficacy of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, Jonathan Shedler tackles both of those questions. The article is succinct enough that I won't summarize it here, except to mention that the conclusion is that psychodynamic psychotherapy (also known as psychoanalysis) is just as effective as other empirical therapies according to the meta-analyses cited here. Shedler's paper is also useful as a guide to what became of Freudian psychoanalysis. It's easy to incorrectly assume that psychodynamic therapy hasn't changed since Freud, so Shedler points out that Freud's "outlandish and inaccessible" speculations aren't representative of today's psychodynamic school of thought.