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MY FOCUS hERE is upon the vital importance of insight for psychoanalytic therapy, theory, and technique. In affirming the curative and creative roles of insight, I am not subscribing to its idealization or assigning to it magical qualities. In analysis, insight is the one element that is never in excess and yet is never complete. I shall maintain that insight propels the psychoanalytic process forward and is a condition, catalyst, and consequence of the psychoanalytic process. There is a circular interaction between the development of insight and productive analytic work leading to structural change.
Obtaining insights, of course, is not confined to psychoanalytic situations. Artists and poets, more in contact with the unconscious, probed and provided insights into the human mind that preceded and probably facilitated psychoanalytic discoveries. If such insights did not necessarily have therapeutic effects, creative persons such as Sophocles and Shakespeare achieved extraordinary understanding of normal fantasy, psychic conflict, and character disorder that continue to inspire psychoanalytic study.
Despite the punitive expulsion from paradise for gaining forbidden knowledge, the quest for insight has always paralleled the "bliss of ignorance." The hero of the oedipal myth moves and wavers between insight and blindness. Oedipus seeks the truth while asserting innocence of his guilt and ignorance of his identity. Analogous to the analytic process, the oedipal myth depicts the struggle between insight and resistance to insight. Oedipus attempts to evade and avoid the very clues and evidence for which he searches, and