Awareness and Stress: Post-Psycho-Analytic Utilization of Insight

This paper is concerned with the nature of awareness, particularly with the character of awareness that prevails during and after a stressful situation. Ordinarily, a new or first awareness of oneself or of the world as it affects oneself is referred to as insight. In a comprehensive paper on the varieties of insight, Zilboorg (4) has re-emphasized that insight is therapeutically effective only when it is an affective process; that permanent and genuine insight occurs as the result of a series of affective reconstructive experiences evolving in the psycho-analytic transference situation. He contrasts this process with intellectual insight which serves as a conceptual prop and does not produce a basic alteration in the psychic structure. He maintains that only affective reconstructive experiences of insight developing in the transference are followed by a meaningful and rational new orientation toward the world and toward one's own self.

The present discussion is focussed on the forces that promote or interfere with the maintenance of an orientation which has followed meaningful insight processes. A psycho-analytic orientation is associated with varying degrees of awareness of previously repressed aspects of the self. Such an orientation may be contrasted with a pre- or non-psycho-analytic orientation where there is no awareness of what is repressed. It is apparent that complex ego functions are essential to sustain a psycho-analytic orientation: derivatives of unconscious fantasies must be permitted to reach consciousness; the counter-cathexis, which would lead to re-repressions of these derivatives, must be withheld; and the significance of the derivatives must be integrated in a meaningful way. Under favourable circumstances, these ego processes occur without calling any attention to their functioning. Presumably, on these occasions, the derivatives of unconscious fantasies are so familiar and acceptable that they are immediately and autonomously integrat