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Insight is an important clinical and theoretical concept, yet it is a concept that remains vague and ambiguous. The author seeks to clarify Freud's notion of insight by drawing on discussions in Brentano and Husserl, and by utilizing Brentano's theory of judgment. She claims that Freud's concept of insight was influenced by his attendance at Brentano's lectures. She presents some convincing analogies to Brentano's work in Freud's ways of expressing himself on logical issues, as well as in his theories of perception, memory, judgment, self-observation, and ultimately insight. The influence appears especially in Freud's logical formulations in his paper on negation. Brentano, and later Husserl, utilized the concept of insight as synonymous with evidence, knowledge, and judgment. For Brentano, insight was an act of consciousness in which there was an immediate, direct apprehension of certainty about the true grounds of an appearance or experience. Since direct apprehension of the unconscious is not possible, Freud, in essence, extended Brentano's concept of insight to the indirect knowledge of the unconscious acquired through incorporating unconscious derivatives and memories into an organized whole. The immediacy and certainty of the conscious judgment involved in this type of insight about the unconscious is, however, the same as in Brentano's general epistemological theory. The author emphasizes that this phenomenological concept is in opposition to the explanatory schemata of the natural sciences. For Freud, insight occurs on the part of the analyst, which is in contrast to the way it is usually spoken of today. Furthermore, Freud almost never connected insight with therapeutic change—that connection comes with later writers, who wish to find a way to define insight without making it tautologically dependent upon clinical change. Yet Freud spoke often about insight, and not just haphazardly. His use of the concept explains why he viewed his case histor