1 An Introduction to Matte-Blanco's Reformulation of the Freudian Unconscious and his Conceptualization of the Internal World

Over the past thirty years Ignacio Matte-Blanco has been developing a fundamentally new way of conceiving conscious and unconscious processes which we believe is of enormous importance to the practising psychoanalyst and to the more academic scholar of the mind and its processes. However, the particular discipline of his arguments may be strange to the psychoanalyst, just as his psychoanalysis may be new to the mere academically minded. He works with one arm, as it were, in psychoanalysis and the other in the concepts of basic mathematical logic and he is definitely not an easy read. In helping him to prepare his manuscript for publication we had the opportunity to read this book in draft and to talk to him a good deal. So in this chapter we are aiming not to give a critical survey but to help the reader unfamiliar with his thinking to appreciate his more central and elementary ideas. Most of these were addressed by Matte-Blanco in his first volume in English, The Unconscious as Infinite Sets (1975a). Other concepts appear for the first time in English later in this book. Our brief notes are of course no substitute for a grasp of these works.¹

Matte-Blanco's starting point is the way Freud conceived unconscious thought. That Freud's conception of the unconscious was a momentous step is widely accepted, at least among those who value the study of humanity's subjective world. But Matte-Blanco believes that both psychoanalysts and those interested in applying psychoanalysis to other aspects of thought have never truly and fully made use of its revolutionary impact. His main purpose has been to show,