'penetrating understanding' is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it when describing someone's knowledge or thought process, or when someone has acquired an insightful interpretation or appreciation of a concept. For example: "His penetrating understanding of the stock market allowed him to make savvy investments."
Barbour has always demonstrated a penetrating understanding of the modern process of achieving political power.
His two Berlioz productions have been crammed with vivid imagery and showed a penetrating understanding of what makes Berlioz's operas such a special challenge.
Their questions to her on intelligence matters elicited "defensive responses" and an ignorance of the subject "inconsistent with her compendious and penetrating understanding of political and international affairs".
The writing all goes into deciding who falls backward through the window, has his head ripped off by the alien, bares his bottom amusingly to get his shots from the pretty nurse, or pouts tensely when the sonar says "Ping!" Mencken fancied himself above it all, but he had a penetrating understanding of star power.
Bellow was a writer about conscience and consciousness, forever conflicted by the competing demands of the great cities, the individual's urge to survival against all odds and his equal need for love and some kind of penetrating understanding of what there was of significance beyond all the racket and racketeering.
Although the novels are quite different, both are set in Nazi-occupied Europe and display their author's eye for perfectly illustrative yet wholly unexpected incident and detail, as well as his talent for storytelling and his extraordinarily subtle and penetrating understanding of human nature.
The psychologists Alfred Adler and Carl Jung were deeply influenced, as was Sigmund Freud, who said of Nietzsche that he had a more-penetrating understanding of himself than any man who ever lived or was ever likely to live.
He dares his opponents to prepare for him, but his preparation is more penetrating and his understanding of this mode of play unequaled.
His goal, he explained, was "a creative expression, the kind of penetrating insight and understanding of Negroes which I believe only a Negro photographer can interpret".
Roy DeCarava documented his native Harlem and the civil rights movement; he said that he strove for "a creative expression, the kind of penetrating insight and understanding of Negroes which I believe only a Negro photographer can interpret".
"I am more penetrating in my understanding than I was 35 years ago.
