INSIGHT AS A FUNDAMENTAL PROCESS IN ANALYTIC TREATMENT

From a psychoanalytic perspective are the awareness of unconscious conflicts and the proper understanding of these the bases of self-knowledge. Insight is a process within the analytical treatment by which the patient manages to penetrate into the nature of unconscious conflict, this connection produces a new vision, a new relationship with the mental contents that until then had not been intelligible producing a significant change in the experience.

With insight we would achieve a more sophisticated understanding of our reality in light of a new context, this is fundamental to understand how this process operates in the treatment.

The transformation that takes place is really a creative act, in the sense that it changes in a greater or lesser degree what exists until that moment, producing a real modification of the personality. The analyst helps in this process by offering the patient’s ego models of integrative thinking by creating new aspects in psychic reorganization. Insight manages to unleash new emotions by having to deal with the anguish that comes from the loss of explanatory hypotheses, which we laboriously constructed throughout our lives, which helped shape the most intimate parts of our identity.

In this phase of introspection we will be able to say farewell to our most dysfunctional part and for this the self must be capable of a controlled regression, of a capacity for self-detachment and self-realization that will finally help us reintegrate the new knowledge acquired about us.

As a result of the repair that occurs when going through all this process, it obtains a autonomy of the introjected internal objects, in addition it contributes understanding about the primitive defense mechanisms that are located in the deep mental strata. During the treatment there may be some resistance in the awareness phase because the tension can increase and our psychic defenses generate a difficult opposition to overcome by the torrent of emotions that can be triggered.

But it is precisely that immersion in our own mental processes that makes it possible to illuminate our understanding of them, finally configured in a different way in a new integrative level. Insight is a process and at the same time the goal of treatment, we must understand it so that we embrace it with recognition and summon their appearance to achieve the true change that we are desiring in therapy.