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In 1959, in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, Ignacio Matte Blanco published a short article entitled “Expressions in Symbolic Logic of the Characteristics of the System Unconscious or the Logic of the System Unconscious.” It was the prelude to his 1975 book The Unconscious as Infinite Sets, which has been all but ignored in the psychoanalytic literature. In 1984, again in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, Ross Skeleton published “Understanding Matte-Blanco,” barely a summary of Matte Blanco's ideas. Since then, they have gained a kind of clinical currency and intellectual following, at least in England, where the interdisciplinary London Bi-Logic Group has been discussing them for almost a decade. Eric Rayner is a member of the group, and his critical exegesis of Matte Blanco's ideas is an attempt to do them theoretical justice and show their clinical application. Klaus Fink (1989) previously tried to do so—perhaps most notably in “From Symmetry to Asymmetry”—but Rayner offers much greater detail and depth.
Matte Blanco's importance has to do with his attempt to understand the unconscious as a kind of calculus. This reductive project is familiar from Bion, and it has been gaining ground. It carries Leibniz's “mathematical dream”—the search for a universal calculus—into psychoanalysis. Leibniz, it may be recalled, first introduced the idea of the unconscious, which he thought of as a continuum of unconscious perceptions or, as he called them, “petites perceptions.” They differed from conscious perceptions only in degree of clarity and distinctness, and the difference can be calculated. Matte Blanco shows us how to do so—shows us the calculus of consciousness and the unconscious, that is, of their continuity. He not only believes, as Leibniz did, that both function logically, but