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.
Ignacio Matte Blanco was born in Santiago on October 3, 1908, and passed away in Rome on January 11, 1995. The younger son of an aristocratic Chilean family, he was educated at the German Gymnasium in Santiago and at the University of Chile, from which he graduated physician-surgeon in 1930. He went to London to become a research fellow in physiology at University College in 1933, but before leaving Chile he had begun an analysis with Dr. Fernando Allende Navarro, the country’s first psychoanalyst.
Building on the foundation of this first contact with psychoanalysis, while in London qualifying as a neuropsychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital and Northumberland House, he also trained as a psychoanalyst in the British Psycho-Analytical Society.
He returned to Chile in 1944, gathering around him a group who established a psychoanalytic study group, later to become the founding group of the Chilean Psychoanalytic Association.
His first two books, Lo Psíquico y la Naturaleza Humana. Hacia un Plant-eamiento Experimental (1954) and Estudios de Psicología Dinámica (1955) were published while in Chile. The former contains the germ of many of his later ideas, one of the most innovative sets of ideas in the field of contemporary psychoanalytic theory, and can be read today as a programme of research paving the way for The Unconscious as Infinite Sets. An Essay in Bi-Logic, which appeared in 1975, and Thinking, Feeling and Being. Clinical Reflections on the Fundamental Antinomy of Human Beings and the World, published in 1988.