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We may criticize or suspect the purely introspective view, but we cannot suppress or eliminate it. Without introspection, without an immediate awarenes of feelings, emotions, perceptions, thoughts, we could not even define the field of human psychology.
Rather than discussing the operative and therapeutic functions of the two concepts, the emphasis here will be on their different modalities of knowing.
Without doubt, of the two, the concept of interpretation has traditionally had a more widely recognized status. Insight, on the other hand, although it came into use as a technical term much later, has always been firmly established, at the operative level of analytical praxis, in a position correlative to that of interpretation (Sandler et al. 1973); it has been easily assimilated by different psychoanalytic orientations (Spacal 1983), despite the fact that it lacks a precise theoretical definition and is not used uniformly in the various psychoanalytic circles; it tends rather to be frequently interchangeable with terms taken from non-technical language