Sibling triangles exist independent of parent-child triangles and undergo parallel development into constellations bearing significant formal and dynamic similarities to the standard parent-child oedipal relationships. They may exert definitive effects on the individual's identifications, adult object choices, and patterns of relating. Recognition of such constellations and their outcomes is often crucial to successful therapy. A developmental line is delineated with emphasis on the recapitulation throughout development of oedipal sibling issues. Speculations are offered about the possible factors responsible for pathological outcomes of oedipal sibling triangles, and about why, in many cases, oedipal sibling experience may be more influential in development than oedipal parental experience.

A conception of insight is proposed, based on a systems and information-processing framework and using current neuroscience concepts, as an integration of information that results in a new symbolization of experience with a significant change in self-image and a transformation of non-declarative procedural knowledge into declarative knowledge. Since procedural memory and knowledge, seen to include emotional and relationship issues, is slow to change, durable emotional and behavioral change often requires repeated practice, a need not explicitly addressed in standard psychoanalytic technique. Working through is thus seen as also encompassing nondynamic factors. The application of these ideas to therapeutic technique suggests possible therapeutic interventions beyond interpretation. An illustrative clinical vignette is presented.

Intuition represents an unconscious cognitive activity, the results of which become conscious at some point. Some recent nonpsychoanalytic explorations of cognition and consciousness are examined to illuminate our understanding of these processes and their relation to the psychoanalytic process. Our thesis is that intuition may be most usefully viewed as a form of unconscious pattern-matching cognition, which becomes conscious under certain conditions and which is only loosely related to primary process. A clinical example is given of the analyst's intuition to illustrate the initial ostensibly theory-free nature of the raw intuition and the subsequent theory-bound explorations of the intuitive conclusion. Implications for teaching and learning psychoanalysis are noted.

The constituents of the complex affective experience of envy are delineated, and defenses against each of these constituents are explored. Attention is then called to a common, variably adaptive, and socially approved means of obviating or coping with envious feelings, involving a partial identification and culminating in the conscious experience of "being proud of." A conjecture is made regarding the kind of pathology most likely to interfere with this mechanism.

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