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Dear Editors,
I would like to thank Paolo Migone for drawing my seeming neglect of Kris's (1956) ‘good analytic hour’ article to my attention. I, myself, was surprised at this apparent omission as I had referenced it in my earlier article applying these ideas to child analysis (Sugarman, 2003). But rereading Kris left me believing I should have included the article because of its importance in the literature, not because it foreshadowed my own thinking. Nowhere in the article could I find evidence supporting Migone's assertion that Kris ‘explicitly advocated a change of the concept of insight from “content” to “process”.’ To be sure, such ideas may be implicit but I could not discern them. My difficulty doing so might involve Kris's use of the ego-psychological model. Elsewhere (Sugarman, in press), I have discussed my preference for more clinically-near structural concepts such as mental functions over abstract theoretical constructs like the tri-partite mental structures. Kris's emphasis on the relationship between the three structures and the ego's integrative function, in particular, makes a direct and explicit comparison of our ideas difficult.
Given this caveat, Kris seemingly was interested in a related but somewhat different aspect of insight. He does mention the function of insight, but only to distinguish genuine insight from insights that a patient uses either defensively or