Insight as Defiance: A Neglected Aspect of Self-Awareness

Insight is a complex phenomenon that could be defined in many ways. I want to bring attention to one of its feature—its defiant, transgressive nature—which is an aspect that I believe may have been neglected in recent times.

If the mind is thought of as a conflicted dynamism of instinct and renunciation, expressive desire and repressive caution, defiance and compliance, spontaneity and reserve, aggression and passivity, insight could be thought of as the great mediator between the world of unconscious repression and conscious deliberation. A mediator has to be a shrewd political negotiator, of course, whose social and psychic finesse belies the essentially aggressive and transgressive nature of his communication. Insight as mediator is overdetermined, to be sure, since it is after all nothing more or less than the instinctual core it has defensively transformed into sublimated, conscious self-awareness. Like curiosity, with which it surely shares a genetic kinship, insight has a raw, subversive, instinctual, and aggressive nature that is well concealed in its exuberant, ego-syntonic quest for sublimated knowledge. But I believe that the defiant, transgressive nature of insight is ever present.

This feature in particular tends to be neglected, if not ignored, as indeed the whole topic of insight in general has been in recent decades of psychoanalytic scholarship. Insight used to be thought of as the essential