Formless infinity. Clinical explorations of Matte Blanco and Bion. Preface by Owen Renik

Riccardo Lombardi is a practising analyst in Rome. The texts in this book are devoted to difficult patients, including psychotics. He has forged his own style, while drawing on Bion (1897–1975), Matte Blanco (1908–1995), and Ferrari (1924–2006), and had direct contacts with the latter two. Bion describes the protomental beta-elements which are a shapeless mixture of affect and bodily sensations outside thought. It is maternal reverie, by virtue of its alpha function, that will rid them of their excess emotion and that will open up a path for them towards perception, and then symbolization and verbalizable thought. Rather than focusing on conscious/unconscious relations, Matte Blanco prefers to give priority to the relations between asymmetrical/symmetrical modes—relations that are close to the first, but which do not overlap with them completely. To make these terms understandable schematically, let’s say that consciousness operates according to asymmetrical logic: if John is Peter’s father, Peter cannot be John’s father. This is an unequivocal, and therefore asymmetrical relationship. On the other hand, at the unconscious level, it becomes possible: Peter can be the father of John. This is seen, for example, clinically when an abused child becomes an abusive parent: subject and object are then indistinguishable. To the unconscious, let us recall, Freud ascribes the following logical rules: “ … exemption from mutual contradiction, primary process (mobility of cathexes), timelessness, and replacement of external by psychical reality … ” (Freud, 1915a, p. 187).† Matte Blanco draws all the consequences from this: if the inside and the outside, one place and another (displacement and condensation), one moment and another (timelessness) are indistinguishable, all notion of order disappears and everything merges with everything else in the unconscious/symmetrical mode, and in particular the subject and the object. In the example given, only a Propositional Function persis