Insight and the analytic dyad

Insight reflects the unitary nature of psychic activity in contrast to the fragmentation created in abstracting categories for the purpose of study and discussion. The unique analytic clinical dyad offers a structure in which intrapsychic fragments can be actualized and integrated. As a result, the analyst's contribution is more crucially one of exploration than of revelation. Whatever the area of examination, past or present, the link to analytic immediacy offers the opportunity to make meanings meaningful, to convert known facts to psychic truths. The analyst's clinical task requires his private self-analysis as part of the collaborative exploration of how the patient's mind works. Higher level ego functioning, including acutely active remembering, is at times transiently loosened in order for the analyst to share in the clinical work of discovery. The words the analyst uses to communicate his understanding convey only approximate manifest meanings, though they structurally reveal deeper messages of importance to the patient. These verbal approximations help stimulate self-reflection in the analysand as a step in the process of gaining insight.