Subjects-Insights

        One of the main controversies in the history of the psychoanalytic movement has coalesced around the meaning and relevance of insight as a clinical category. A divide has often separated a more classic epistemic orientation from a concern for the analysand’s affective well being which, supposedly, may or may not have much to do with the making conscious of conflicts and/or deficits. Through the conjunctive (it’s me and so it’s mine…) synthesis, Deleuze and Guattari are effectively redefining insight and in the process rearranging the terms if not the relevance of the debate here. The conjunctive synthesis is ostensibly a “so that’s what it is!” moment of insight and a clarity identified by its effect to reorganize radically not only delirium (thought) but hallucination (perception) and intensity (experience) as well. The “so that’s what it is!” is not so much a revelation or an uncovering of the subject to itself but the making of a subject. Instead of simply eliciting in the analysand a greater sense of subjective responsibility, or a greater capacity to tolerate anxiety and its ambivalence, or even a broader affective vocabulary or repertoire, the conjunctive synthesis is quasi traumatic in its quality for it is the signpost of a radical shift in the subject’s thought, perception, and experience, which is to say in the subject’s way of deploying itself for itself and for others. Insight is that rare moment of tremor in the clinical situation that marks for both analyst and analysand a transformation, not only in understanding but also in being and in relating. However, and whereas the trauma (of war or abuse for instance) dissociates the subject from its experiences, thoughts, and perceptions, and in so doing robs it of its agility and ossifies it, insight, analytic or otherwise, multiplies the connections between the components; it produces new recordings, experiences, subjectivities; it makes such multiplications and productions tolerable.

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