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The morning I discovered Matte Blanco I had just finished giving a lecture on logic and was leafing through the psychotherapy journals when I chanced on the review of a book with the improbable title of The Unconscious as Infinite Sets. I had always thought that my dual interests of psychotherapy and logic were irreconcilable and had long kept them separate. But this book was to teach me that logic could illuminate
clinical problems in psychotherapy. Now at last we have a good introduction to Matte Blanco's ideas written by Eric Rayner which makes this very different psychoanalytic perspective relatively easy to understand. He explains new concepts step by step but, more importantly, he gives many clinical illustrations of logical ideas. But firstly, who is Matte Blanco?
Matte Blanco was a British-trained Chilean psychoanalyst and psychiatrist with a special interest in schizophrenia, and most of his startling clinical examples come from work with psychotic patients. His initial article ‘Expression in symbolic logic of the characteristics of the system Ucs’ (which appeared in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in ) directly links his theory to what he calls ‘schizophrenic thinking’. His most original idea is that the mind operates two logics at the same time. This double process is called ‘Bi-logic’. One logic is our customary bivalent logic which he calls asymmetric, and the other is the ambi-valent logic of the dream which he calls symmetric. The two kinds of logic characterize two kinds of being: symmetrical being which approximates the timeless, changeless world of Parmenides, and asymmetrical being which approximates the spatio-temporal flux of everyday life. In all our mental processes both forms of being are co-present but distinct and irreconcilable. Now how can this bi-logic and philosophy be useful clinically?
Rayner begins his account with Freud who, in the Rat Man case, recalls a case from earlier days. The patient, Freud noted, always had brand