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WHEN PRESENTED WITH A TOPIC, ONE TENDS TO CONNECT IT WITH what one has already thought and written about. And then, with some presumption, these connections can be called insight. I have yielded to this temptation, here where the assigned subject is the meaning of insight in psychoanalysis; and what I have to say will illustrate this limited narcissistic kind of insight. At least I begin with what is indispensable about any definition of insight: it involves making connections.
"Only connect!"—I am quoting E. M. Forster's (1910) prescription for England in Howard's End—"only connect the prose and the passion!" (p. 187): that is to say, connect the ideas and facts and the will and ability to act with the emotions. In our psychoanalytic language, this has been applied to insight by Valenstein (1962), "mutative or dynamic insight … amounts to … extended self-knowledge, combining … affective-conative and intellectual cognitive components" (p. 323).
I am connecting insight to one of my own papers which is a minor commentary on some of the metaphors in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams(Shengold, 1966). I want to stand beside Arlow and champion metaphor in these days when psychoanalytic concepts and language have come under attack for using it. To paraphrase Forster, psychoanalytic prose should be full of passion and its conveyer, metaphor. Trilling (1940) has written that Freud pictured the mind as a poetry-making organ. Metaphor is inherent to human thought and, it follows, is essential