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THOMAS CARLYLE, WRITING ON HISTORY, asked, "What is knowledge … but recorded experience, and a product of history; of which, therefore, reasoning and belief, no less than action and passion, are essential materials?" This admonition might well be directed to modern psychoanalysts struggling with the concept of insight and its relationship to therapeutic change. I will suggest in this paper that a shift of emphasis is necessary for our concept of insight to become a more effective tool in the goals of therapy. To be effective for change and growth, insight must include clarification and repair of disordered cognition, the individual's ways of knowing both sensate and syntactic experience.
When we consider that psychoanalytic theories have in common assumptions that much of human behavior and mental functioning stem from unconscious processes, from needs, thoughts, feelings, actions and premises about living that lie outside of awareness, a concept of insight is inevitable. Yet different theories emphasize the importance of different insights and often use different explanatory systems for organizing them. With time, both the development of our theories and our experience with patients have also expanded the base of significant knowledge that becomes important in understanding the complexities of people's difficulties in living. Indeed, our concepts of insight have become so diffuse and expanded, that a sense of futility and frustration often attends our attempts to encompass all into the design of effective insight therapies.