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1 - Historical overview

from Part I - Historical and Clinical

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 October 2009

Ivana Marková
Affiliation:
University of Hull
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Summary

Exploring the history of insight in mental disorders is complicated by a number of factors. Foremost amongst these is the question as to which definition of insight to examine. As will become evident in subsequent chapters, insight and related terms can refer to concepts which range considerably in meaning from the very narrow to much broader notions. For example, much of the work on insight in patients with organic brain syndromes uses a fairly narrow concept relating to awareness of specific problems/deficits (Marková & Berrios, 2000). On the other hand, insight studied in general psychiatry, particularly in patients with psychoses, has tended to be viewed in a more general sense of awareness of illness (McEvoy et al., 1989a, b, c; Young et al., 1993, Amador & David, 2004) and/or with broader elaborations incorporated within the concept such as additional interpretations (Greenfeld et al., 1989), attributions (Amador et al., 1991), re-labelling (David, 1990) and self-knowledge (Marková & Berrios, 1992a; Gillett, 1994). Then there is the notion of insight viewed in terms of specific problem solving as in Gestalt cognitive psychology (Sternberg & Davidson, 1995) or, different again, is the deeper notion of insight as psychodynamic ‘comprehension’ (Richfield, 1954) and indeed the cognitive view according to which insight is a function of some ‘mind reading system’ (Baron-Cohen, 1995).

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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  • Historical overview
  • Ivana Marková, University of Hull
  • Book: Insight in Psychiatry
  • Online publication: 22 October 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511543999.003
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  • Historical overview
  • Ivana Marková, University of Hull
  • Book: Insight in Psychiatry
  • Online publication: 22 October 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511543999.003
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Historical overview
  • Ivana Marková, University of Hull
  • Book: Insight in Psychiatry
  • Online publication: 22 October 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511543999.003
Available formats
×