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Insight is a sine qua non of the psychoanalytic process and is a condition, catalyst, and consequence of the psychoanalytic process. Analytic insight consists of penetrating and understanding the inner nature of things and must be differentiated from other types of self knowledge and awareness and from pseudoinsight. The patient becomes acquainted in an entirely new way with the unconscious danger situation as it presents itself in the analytic situation and as it is worked through with the help of analytic interpretation. Danger is then mastered by a mature ego rather than the infantile ego of the past.
There are different levels and underlying processes in the development of insight. The importance of insight can be seen in theory and therapy, in analyst and patient, and in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. In a broad sense, resistance in analysis refers to resistance to insight. The inexorable goal of analysis is insight. Psychoanalysis seeks to minimize noninsightful influences and to maximize insight leading to structural change. The reverse sequence of structural change causing insight is unreliable. Nevertheless, there are clinical limitations to gaining and retaining insight.
A certain degree of development must be achieved to acquire insight. The child must have negotiated separation-individuation, achieved object constancy, and attained attitudes belonging to the positive and negative Oedipus complex with the co-ordinated ego achievements of self-observation and secondary process functioning. Children and infantile adults are restricted in their insight.
The types of insight communicated to patients today are by no means identical with what was analytically interpreted in the pioneering days. Our insights into the roots of the personality are much greater today. We know more of the preoedipal period and its i