TIFT #119: How Important is Insight?

Darwin shocked the world into a new level of humility when he showed that humans aren’t the center of the world but derived from apes. Well, the wave of humility hasn’t quite finished its washing up the beach. The last barrier is consciousness-centrism. I, too, have been guilty of seeing the mind from the point of view of consciousness. I, too, have caught myself thinking (and writing) of the unconscious mind as different but equal. I have been seeing the "nonconscious problem solver" or inner mind as a separate entity trying to influence the person to do what it thinks is best. There is a problem with that. Notice the implication that the “person” is basically consciousness and that the inner mind is viewed as an ancillary component.

Maybe this is a bit subtle, but as I have been working on the new book, “How Psychotherapy Works: Navigating the Therapeutic Space with Confidence,” I have found myself being tentative as I assert that the Inner Mind is purposeful. What is the evidence that this subcortical part of the brain actually knows what it wants and is pushing for it? Then I read an article by Tim Marsh and Simon Boag (2013) that took a truly humble point of view. A better way to think of the human mind is that the inner, unconscious, "thinking fast" mind is the basic mind. It came first to fulfill the role of protector. Recognizing it as the original mind, consciousness looks more like a fancy add-on, an afterthought of evolution, to help us deal with the complex social matrix our species has come to depend on for survival. 

From that point of view, the basic, nonconscious mind is the main guiding force behind human behavior, while consciousness allows us a bit of room to edit its promptings before putting them into action. From that point of view, the purposefulness of the inner mind is not a conjecture or even a feature, but the reason for its very existence. 

Of course, we professionals are among the last to embrace this truth. In our arrogance, we tend to discount the driven vitality of the unconscious mind. Meanwhile,  advertisers and politicians have long been aware that appealing to conscious reasoning is not the way to influence behavior. It’s the music, smiles, slogans, image-making, and pretty people that reach into the basic inner mind to have real influence.

How is this relevant to insight?

We usually think of insight from a consciousness-centric point of view as a tool in the hands of the conscious, logical person. First we use it to achieve awareness, then we think of our (conscious) selves as reaching inside to make changes in the same way we might make adjustments to our grip on the tennis racket or correct a misunderstanding. We think that way, but we may be aware somehow that it's wrong. We don't really have the power to control the way our inner mind responds. What we can voluntarily control is what is conscious. That’s top-down change, which has its role in psychotherapy, but is not the way therapy really works. Good therapy aims to reach down to the foundations of EMPs (entrenched maladaptive patterns), the less-than-optimal implicit learnings responsible for so much trouble in humans, and those are located in limbic structures out of direct reach of our conscious efforts.

Changing core beliefs and values or resolving the inner conflicts that lead to EMPs doesn’t happen from the top down. It requires bottom-up processes like memory reconsolidation that allow rewriting implicit (unconscious) learning deep in the subcortical brain where it is stored. As I have repeated so many times, the two  requirements for that bottom-up change process are, simultaneously, activating the old implicit learning and delivering specific disconfirming information to the appropriate limbic structures. So the punch line is: 

The crucial importance of insight is that having it and putting it into words serves to activate precisely those deep, implicit learnings that we want to change. At the same time, insight supports consciously discovering how the inner mind has it wrong and allows a new, disconfirming perspective to be transmitted down to limbic locations where it can rewrite the old learning.

Insight does other nice things, too, like satisfying our curiosity, cementing the therapeutic alliance and giving hope that we are on the right track. Those promote the “common factors” that set the table, but the critical function of insight is that it helps with fulfillment of conditions for change in subcortical locations outside the reach of consciousness.

Reference:

Marsh, T., & Boag, S. (2013). Evolutionary and differential psychology: conceptual conflicts and the path to integration. Frontiers in Psychology, 4. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00655.

Jeffery Smith MD

Photo credit,  Jaime Street, Unsplash