Insight and Its Classification

The nature of insight, its classification, and role in psychoanalytic therapy, represents one of the most difficult problems in psychoanalysis today. Thus, an inspection of recent reviews of this issue (e.g., in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 1979, or the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 1981), reveals that whereas a certain agreement exists between different authors about the descriptive empirical findings, particularly when attributing to insight the vital role in psychoanalytic therapy, there are only a few systematic treatments of this issue. The present status of this issue is well illustrated by the fact that there is not even a fully satisfactory analytic definition of insight which can be agreed upon, although a number of widely differing attempts to define it can be found in the literature. Thus, for example, Kris (1956) sees insight as a process that makes use of the ego function of self-observation in both “experiential” and “reflective” forms. Myerson refers to insight when a new or first awareness of oneself or of the world as it affects oneself appears, and according to Valenstein (1979) “the term insight suggests the literal ‘seeing into’—or the achieved recognition of—the knowing to a larger extent cognitively and by