INTROSPECTION

The etymology of the term introspection gives a clear indication of its meaning: the mental activity of a subject who is attentive to her/his own psychic processes (who looks inside ).

Late nineteenth-century psychologists (Alfred Binet in France, the Würzburg school in Germany, Edward Bradford Tiltchener in the United States, to name but a few) considered introspection to be the sovereign method until its throne was usurped by objectivism and behaviorism.

The word has had a bad press in psychoanalysis. However, psychoanalysis was born from just such an effort at self-observation, with Freud's self-analysis (Anzieu). Unlike introspection, however, which focuses only on conscious processes, that self-analysis opened the way for the "Freudian revolution" (Robert): Freud's discovery, below the conscious level, of wishes and the obstacles in their way, of the roundabout processes such wishes use to achieve fulfill-ment—in a word, the unconscious.

Introspection should be clearly distinguished from the "capacity for insight," the patient's ability in the course of treatment to experience his or her own psychic dynamics in a new way—a major feature of the psychoanalytic approach (Blacker).

Roger Perron

See also: Autobiography; Insight; Sartre and psychoanalysis; Self-consciousness.

Bibliography

Anzieu, Didier. (1986). Freud's self-analysis (Peter Graham, Trans.). London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. (Original work published 1975)

Blacker, Kay Hill. (1981). Insight (panel). Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 29, 659-672.

Robert, Marthe. (1964). La Révolution freudienne. Paris: Payot.