I completely agree that Lacanian psychoanalysis is pointless in the treatment of autism. Those who believed in the "refrigerator mother" were wrong. Personally, I think Lacanian analysis is bizarre at the best of times and insane at its worst. Lacan was.
But in this country now, psychoanalysis (though it's varied) is used to treat people who typically are struggling with long term inabilities to change their personalities and the way they view the world, and are suffering. It incorporates ideas from neurology and other areas of psychology, and has a focus on being a two-person process, a contract between the patient and practitioner to walk as fearlessly as possible into the darkest, most terrifying territory of the patient's mental life, to try very hard to shed light on it again and again, and to provide a safe place to imagine that it might be thought of and experienced differently. It's respectful, has more in common with the realms of art and philosophy, with making meaning and overcoming obstacles, than with pharmaceuticals, though in some ways bathing the brain in endorphins and seratonin via a comfortable, adventurous and affirming relationship is no different from doing it via pills. It's just that it is the original way we do it, and the pills mimic it.
It's a complicated field, and as with all mental health treatments it helps some and doesn't help others, and has good practitioners and, sadly, bad ones. You'd be able to find examples of bad work. But your assessment is, in the main, wrong.
Autism is one of the most baffling, difficult and upsetting disorders there is. Honestly, no treatment works wonderfully. The spectrum is huge and I suspect someday the diagnosis will be refined into a number of them, more than the usual Asperger's Syndrome/Autism.
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