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siodine comments on How to tell apart science from pseudo-science in a field you don't know ? - Less Wrong
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There is an ancient and noble tradition of burning a straw-Freud, which started during the Freudian analysis vs Jungian analysis and analysis vs behaviorism conflicts decades ago, and it is still used today to signal your allegiance to a specific tribe, usually either skeptical or religious, depending on context. On LW this tradition is honored during the winter solstice, too.
I would recommend against classical Freudian psychoanalysis in this case simply because it was developed for dealing with stuff like this, which is fairly uncommon in our society; and is probably completely unrelated to autism.
I'm sorry I can't give you a more specific advice than this: try to contact families with similar problems and ask what worked for them. Seems to me that no therapy is scientifically proved yet, but I would probably bet on something like CBT.
When dealing with an autistic child, my impression from reading some blogs is that you should not expect any "common sense" at people-related things. Just accept that the autistic child has greater inferetial distances and problem understanding metaphors, therefore explain to them everything very simply and literally.
I assume by "scientifically proved" you mean well supported by the available evidence, in which case CBT has already attained that [edit: I don't mean specifically for autism; Villiam_Bur's comment leads me to infer that he's referring to CBT being a potentially useful therapy more generally]. And the reason Freud is so disparaged is because his methodology was at best proto-scientific and at worst speculation, and yet people still take him seriously. For that reason, I speculate the hostility ostensibly directed towards Freud is actually intended for his current supporters.
Actually, I wanted to say that there is no proof that CBT works for autism; but because it was proved to work for other things, I would bet on it anyway. I don't believe it could cure the cause, but I believe it could teach some useful behaviors to somehow compensate for the missing skills.
Perhaps I'm missing a point here, but when I look in Google Scholar there seems to be enough existing research on CBT & autism to say whether it helped or not.
Those articles seem mostly about CBT used to reduce anxiety and obsessive-compulsive behavior at autistic children. Yes, that's an area where CBT is successful, and it's a great news that it works for autists too.
But to me it seems like it does not address the "essence" of autism (not that I know exactly what the essence of autism is), only fixes some symptoms. At the end, if everything succeeds, you will still have an autistic child; some of the problems will be fixed, some of them will remain. Yes, it's worth doing, just don't get your hopes too high.