Editorial Introduction

Although the work of Chilean-born Matte Blanco remains relatively unknown in the English-speaking world, his development of Freud's early paradigm of the unconscious is pivotal to understanding the relationship between thought and feeling. Working within Freud's model of the unconscious, he extended the five characteristics - condensation, displacement, absence of negation, timelessness, and the confusion of inner fantasy with outer reality - in a highly original way. Through his realization that the linguistic structure of schizophrenic communication could be analysed by utilizing the tenets of symbolic logic, which is a sub-branch of mathematical theory, he laid the foundations for a theory which he entitled ‘bi-logic’ since it incorporated a model of communication dependent upon the shifting dynamic between two types of logic - asymmetric and symmetric. He further extended the usage of this theoretical discovery from the analysis of psychiatric patents to more general clinical work within the consulting room, as the following writers demonstrate (Carvalho and Ginzburg: this issue), while writers working within other disciplines have also demonstrated that ‘bi-logic’ theory is equally capable of informing an interpretation of film (Valentine: this issue) and theology (Bomford: this issue). All four of these papers thus exemplify the innovatory nature of Matte Blanco's thought.

In recognition of Matte Blanco's contribution to psychoanalysis and to mark the centenary of his birth, the Freud Museum together with the London Bi-logic Group hosted a conference in autumn 2009. Of the papers in this issue of the BJP, three by Carvalho, Ginzburg and Bomford were part of the presentation of papers presented to the Conference, while the fourth, by Valentine, had earlier been read to the London Bi-logic Group in October 2008.

Carvalho is the Chair of the London Bi-logic Group and his paper demonstrates the theoretical complexities and nuances of Matte Blanco's theory. Beginnin