You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Rodney Bomford is a parish priest and theologian. He has written a book ‘for those who are dissatisfied with debate in the church, who look for an understanding of Christian faith which is neither literalist nor reductionist’ and which aims to transcend these positions.
The essential idea is that the attributes of God (pp. 72-4) are indistinguishable from the characteristics of the unconscious as described in Freud's 1915 paper, ‘The Unconscious’: ‘The concept of God and the concept of the unconscious have much in common and share, to a significant degree, the same kind of reality’ (p. 4). It is however the logical development of Freud's 1915 paper by Ignacio Matte Blanco, a Chilean psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, with which Rodney Bomford is particularly concerned. I shall dwell on a description of this at some length firstly because Matte Blanco is still unfamiliar to many analysts; secondly because it will allow me to touch on many of the essential themes of this book whose breadth and density preclude a comprehensive review; and thirdly because it will make my more serious reservations about Bomford's important book more intelligible.
The five characteristics that Freud described in his paper of 1915 are:
the absence of contradiction and of negation,
condensation,
displacement,
timelessness, and
the indistinguishability between inner and outer, between fantasy and reality.
Matte Blanco's revolution was to notice that these five characteristics were all characteristics of what a mathematician called Dedekind described as an ‘infinite set’. A finite set can only be put into a one-to-one correspondence with a set of equal size, whereas an infinite set is one that can be put into one-to-one correspondence with one of its subsets. To illustrate, as Rodney Bomford does on p. 28 of his book, take the set of all positive whole numbers, 1, 2, 3 … n. This is an infinite number. But then so is the set of all even numbers, even though intuition may suggest that such a set should b