Unconscious Logic. An Introduction to Matte Blanco's Bi-Logic and its Uses: Eric Rayner. London:  Routledge 1995.

Ignacio Matte Blanco (1908-1995) was born in Chile and qualified in medicine at the age of 20. By the age of 25 he was assistant professor of physiology, but his interest in psychiatry and psychoanalysis led him to London where he trained as an analyst in the late 1930's. While in England he also studied mathematical logic. After working as a psychiatrist in America during the war he returned to Chile to take the chair of psychiatry at Santiago. He spent many years studying the speech of schizophrenic patients. His findings were published in the Int. J. Psych. Anal. in 1940, 1943 and 1959. He wrote two books, The Unconscious as Infinite Sets (1975) and Thinking, Feeling and Being (1988) in which he expounded his own theory of the mind. His work is particularly about the role of emotion in thinking. Starting with Freud's two principles of mental functioning, primary and secondary process, he elaborated in detail how these represent two different logics. He described primary process as symmetrical thinking, in contrast to the differentiating asymmetry of rational secondary process thought. The term bilogic denotes the combination of these two processes in all mental activity. For example, although dreams are the purest example of symmetrical thinking we have, they often contain elements of rational thought.

Eric Rayner was the first to generate support for Matte Blanco with his 1981 paper in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Since then he has been the leading light of the London Bi-Logic Group, which although small has attracted people with a wide variety of interests who have seen the creative possibilities in Matte Blanco's work. Without this focus, Matte Blanco would have remained unknown outside his native Chile and Rome, where he spent the last thirty years of his life.

Matte Blanco's ideas are quite difficult to understand at first acquaintance, and many people have dismissed his work as idiosyncratic. Those of inquiring mind may be fascinated by a new