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At the instigation of Miss Anna Freud, a scientific forum on ‘The Significance of Insight in Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice’ was held at the Hampstead Clinic from 9 to 11 November 1979. It was attended by 72 participants, nearly half of whom were staff members and students from the Hampstead Clinic, with some invited analysts from London who are associated with the work of the Clinic. Most of the other participants came from the United States, and a handful from European countries, Israel and Canada.
The forum started with a plenary session on Friday morning, chaired by Dr J. Lampl-de Groot. In her introductory remarks, Miss Freud referred to the dangers inherent in small institutions like the Hampstead Clinic of becoming ‘ingrown’ without adequate stimulation from outside or the absorption of new or different ideas and points of view. She also remarked that this forum fulfilled some of the hopes which she had when founding the Clinic, that it would become not only a place for the training of students in child psychotherapy and for research in this field but also a centre to which analysts from all over the world could come for the exchange of views, for study and further learning.
The first half of the opening plenary session was devoted to Miss Freud's introductory paper on ‘Insight: its presence or absence as an element in normal development’1, followed by a discussion introduced by Dr K. Eissler.
During the second half of this plenary session, Dr S. Guttman read his position statement on ‘Freud and insight’, followed by Dr A. Valenstein on ‘Insight as an embedded concept in the early historical phase of psychoanalysis’. The session concluded with a further period of plenary discussions.
On Friday afternoon, the assembly broke up into three groups which met separately. The first group was chaired by Prof. J. Sandler and took as the starting point for its deliberations Prof. J. Masson's position statement on ‘Current transference experience versus the recovery of