Wisdom won from illness: the psychoanalytic grasp of human being.

From its inception psychoanalysis claimed not merely to be an effective therapy for psychological suffering, but to shed light on the human condition. But what kind of insight does psychoanalysis offer? This paper locates psychoanalysis in the western philosophical tradition, arguing that psychoanalysis provides not only theoretical wisdom about the human, but practical wisdom of a peculiar kind. The human mind, through its self-conscious understanding can be immediately and directly efficacious in shaping its own structure.