The Emotional Problem and the Therapeutic Role of Insight

It is always baffling and even a little discouraging to find that throughout history many discoveries and inventions have gained currency without preservation of the name of the given discoverer or inventor in the memory of man, and that the discovery or the invention itself frequently remains diffuse and vague for everybody to use in his own way, following his own bias or whim. Although man's indifference and ingratitude toward those who served him with a discovery or invention is conspicuous, in matters practical and tangible the situation is not so bad. No one knows, for instance, and no one particularly cares to know, who invented the nail, the hammer, or the saw. Literally hundreds of thousands of minor tools and refinements are invented daily by many anonymous, skilled minds and hands whose names will never be known.

In matters much more important but much less tangible—as psychological, ethical, or sociological—the anonymity of the inventor is more deplorable and the clarity of the concepts with which we are dealing suffers considerably more as a result. No one knows who invented or discovered the term and concept of insanity; as a result, almost twenty-five centuries of psychiatric history have failed to produce a clear-cut concept of 'insanity'. The lawyer, the average citizen, the psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, psychologist, each has his own idea of what insanity means, and each has his own unclarities which he glosses over in favor of his own professional, group, or purely fortuitous bias. Neither semantic nor realistic clarity can be