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Most people do not know much about Matte Blanco's bi-logic, so I will first present something about his fundamental conceptions and afterwards work towards a finale about feelings. These basic conceptions turn out to be extremely simple but they are so general, so abstract, that they are maddening to grasp. With this warning, off we go.
Freud's greatest contribution was, perhaps, to show that certain fundamental forms of transformation, representation or symbolization were taking place in the mind: a conscious idea or act could stand for some other experience but the link between the two was often not apparent. Unconscious processes were inferred as taking place. Freud showed that these unconscious processes do not obey the ordinary rules of logic. In fact he spelt out especially five characteristics of the unconscious which highlighted the differences from conscious level thought. These were displacement, condensation, timelessness, absence of mutual contradiction and replacement of external by internal reality.
These characteristics provided a start for Matte-Blanco. He was fascinated by Freud's systematic definition of such mental operations for the first time in history. But they are a disparate list. Surely, Matte thought, as unconscious processes can, at least sometimes, be understandable, they cannot be random; so they must obey some underlying rule or rules. If these fundamentals could be found then how much easier analytic work could be (Matte Blanco 1975, 1988; see also Rayner 1995).
Here Matte started at a different conceptual position from Freud but he still saw his ideas as complementing not contradicting classical analysis. Matte's stress was upon ways of knowing or cognitive structures, his interest is epistemological. As well as - not instead of - psychodynamics, analysis must also be about knowledge with its implications, negations, contradictions, paradoxes, confusions, distortions and obliteration. Logic and illogic are central to analysis.
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