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This is the latest and perhaps the most elaborate of Matte-Blanco's writings: in it he continues to develop his ideas about the Unconscious, its laws, how to understand the workings of the human mind in psychoanalytic terms and how to apply this understanding to clinical work. This book is a further and important step in the author's long road in the exploration of the psyche. Matte-Blanco started developing his ideas more than 40 years ago as can be seen by reviewing the reference list at the end of the book. It was my privilege to have met Matte-Blanco 35 years ago and to have worked with him during the first years in which he formulated the basic thoughts of what today constitutes the main body of his theories, that is, the concepts of symmetry and asymmetry, of bi-logic and of the fundamental antinomy.
Matte-Blanco writes in a systematic way which shows him in his lifelong role as an exponent and teacher of Psychoanalysis. The book has 5 parts and 16 chapters divided in numerous sub-chapters plus 32 clinical examples. For the non-initiated there is a very useful introduction by Eric Rayner and David Tuckett. For the mathematically shy and fearful there is just the indispensable higher calculus and geometry in order to understand some of the scientific points which reaffirm the clinical-theoretical issues presented here. Matte-Blanco takes the reader through an amazing amount of analytical theory and practice explaining it in the light of bi-logic. In this way we are given a tour de force through Freud's postulations about the Unconscious, projection, introjection and dreams. Matte-Blanco revises Freud's conception of the Unconscious in detail and shows how Freud had the geniality of intuiting the logical laws which govern the Unconscious, the facts of timelessness and spacelessness and what Freud explained as telescoping and substituting which Matte-Blanco sees as the whole represented by any of its parts and vice versa, any part represented by the whole. Chapter