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.
This book will interest people who have come across bi-logic, but have felt daunted by Matte-Blanco's own writing. Eric Rayner was the first to generate support for Matte-Blanco, with his 1981 paper in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. Since then, he has been the leading-light of the London Bi-Logic Group, which, although small, has attracted members with a wide variety of interests who have seen the creative possibilities in Matte-Blanco's work. Without this focus, Matte-Blanco would have remained unknown outside his native Chile and Rome, where he spent the last thirty years of his life.
Ignacio Matte-Blanco spent many years as a psychiatrist in Chile, studying the speech of schizophrenic patients. He trained as a psychoanalyst in London in the late 1930s, before returning to Chile. While in England, he also studied mathematical logic. He wrote two books, The Unconscious as Infinite Sets and Thinking, Feeling and Being , in which he expounded his theory of the mind. Starting with Freud's two principles of mental functioning, primary and secondary process, he elaborated in detail how these represent two different logics. He described primary process as symmetrical thinking, in contrast to the differentiating asymmetry of rational secondary-process thought. The term bi-logic denotes the combination of these two processes in all mental activity. For example, although dreams are the purest example of symmetrical thinking we have, they often contain elements of rational thought.
Matte-Blanco's bi-logic has stimulated some people to think in a new way about primary and secondary process. For them, it has been an illumination of psychoanalytic theory and a creative approach to understanding the unconscious mind. People who respond positively to Matte-Blanco are likely to write papers which develop their own applications of his theory. For the majority, however, Matte-Blanco remains something of a puzzle: his obsessionality and single-mindedness, together with