The Psychoanalytic Insight 

By Ioan Lungu

If we open any common dictionary, we'll find out that insight means something like: "the ability to see and understand clearly the inner nature of things, especially by intuition". Unhappily, nobody explains the significance of the sentence "inner nature of things"; even more, we wonder curiously who could state the truth concerning this enigmatical "inner nature"!

In psychoanalysis, the "insight" is a sort of "clear understanding", but this is related to a kind of a feeling of liberation as from a psychical burden. This "psychical burden" represents what we could call a psychological inner fact. Clarifying this inner psychological fact is the task of psychoanalysis, more precisely of the interpretation of the symptoms.

What is a symptom? Well, this question has received many answers. We will propose our own answer: a symptom is a frame of mind that disturbs us. We could represent this "frame of mind" under the form of an external entity, a human being or an animal, maybe even an insect that disturbs us one way or another. Obviously, this "symptom" is the subject matter of  a subjective perception. Moreover, we could speak of a subjective interpretation. The symptoms we refer at hereby are only frames of mind, that means they manifest only at the level of the psychological life.

The interpretation of psychical symptom is the task of psychoanalysis. It consists of a sort of link-(re)creation between the proper symptom and another psychical fact that is included in a psychical conflict. At the end of this interpretation effort we are able to assert that we understood the signification of the symptoms.

On the highest understanding level we could speak of "psychoanalytic insight", which  is, in fact, nothing else than understanding the significance. And, as we could see before, this understanding is accompanied by a relief frame of mind!

The role of the "insight" in the  psychoanalytic treatment is extremely important, if not even decisive for completing it.

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