ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on insight and how its quest for knowledge can seem transgressive in the eyes of structural judicial aspects of the mind. Transgression has disturbed the peace. Transgression reconsiders, waffles, regresses. Sometimes it stands its ground. The drama of transgression and regression, courage and cowardice, insight and repression, and challenge and appeasement characterize clinical process throughout the analytic experience. The analyst’s empathy for such states of resistance is crucial as the vessel of insight charts its course tentatively, daringly, and eventually successfully as analysis proceeds toward termination, analyst and analysand, Titanic and person terminal, negotiating the rapids of transference and counter-transference all the way. The insight that Rebecca embraced with such an “ahah” of recognition suggested that the conscious need to control the objects in her life was directly related to an unconscious instability or chaos, an out-of-control state that she had lived with intra-psychically since early childhood.
