According to Harry Stack Sullivan, four levels of insight exist:

1. Interpersonal presentation - clients gain a more objective perspective about how they appear to others

2. Complex insight - clients comprehend interactional patterns of behavior

3. Motivational insight - clients understand why they act in certain ways

4. Genetic insight - clients understand why they are the way they are

Sullivan's Concepts of Interpersonal Relationships:

Sullivan built his approach to psychiatry on the study of personality characteristics that can be directly observed in the context of interpersonal relationships. Personality is viewed as being formed by the interpersonal relationships an individual has during his entire lifetime, especially with those closest to him. Although patterns of behavior are modified during the aging process, the basic core remains.

"Anxiety", a term Sullivan employed in a special way, is one of the central concepts of interpersonal psychiatry. Sullivan basically placed all types of emotional suffering including guilt, shame, dread, and feelings of personal worthlessness into the category of anxiety. Within this framework, anxiety can be viewed as a warning signal. All causes of anxiety share one commonality: they threaten the individual's feelings of personal worth and competence, eroding his/or her concepts of capability and self-esteem. Because of these factors, anxiety tends to bind a person in whatever unhealthy interpersonal patterns are already present.

Arising from short or long-term unhealthy relationships with others, anxiety is always interpersonal in origin. To facilitate healthy adjustments, the major task of psychiatric treatment is to decrease the various kinds of emotional discomforts grouped under the term "anxiety". Eventually, the individual develops a concept of himself/or herself called self-dynamism. This is accomplished by stressing and developing characteristics which meet with approval from significant others and de-emphasizing aspects which meet with disapproval.