Therapeutic Insight and Aspect Perception

ABSTRACT In psychotherapy patients gain new insights into their mental life. Although philosophers have used examples from psychotherapy to make points in debates on self‐knowledge, there has been little serious effort to understand the nature and epistemology of therapeutic insight events. The paper fills that gap. It is argued that an understanding of such insights can be achieved by considering them through the lens of Wittgenstein's discussion of aspect perception. It is claimed that therapeutic insight can be understood in analogy to aspect perception, and that the interpersonal process leading to insight is in its central features analogous to the interpersonal occurrence of aspect perception.