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.
What is a review of a theological book doing in a psychotherapy journal? The answer is in the word symmetry, which here means the symmetrical logic of the psychoanalyst Ignacio Matte Blanco. Freud's concept of primary and secondary process are replaced in Matte Blanco's theory by symmetrical and asymmetrical logic. His system of bi-logic describes the way the two processes, imagination and rational thinking, are combined in mental life. The essence of symmetrical thinking is that in the unconscious there is no contradiction, so that any statement implies its opposite. Emotional experiences are free from the constraints of time and causality. Rodney Bomford uses bi-logic to give an account of the meaning of Christianity.
Matte Blanco was a Chilean psychiatrist who came to London to train as a psychoanalyst in the 1930s. He also studied mathematical logic. After spending the War years working as an analyst in the USA, he returned to Chile to take the chair in psychiatry at Santiago. He spent many years studying the speech of schizophrenic patients, publishing his results in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 1940, 1943 and 1959. In 1960 he moved to Rome as a training analyst, and died there in 1995. His most important work, the Unconscious as Infinite Sets was published in England in 1975. His second book, Thinking, Feeling and Being followed in 1988.
Although Matte Blanco had a following in Chile and Rome, he would have been unknown in this country if it had not been for Eric Rayner, who wrote a paper about him in 1981. Rayner realised the potential of Matte Blanco's work for understanding unconscious mental processes. A small group of interested people gathered around Rayner and formed the London Bi-logic Group. Rodney Bomford was invited into the group, not because of his theological credentials but because of his background in mathematics. From the outset, the group was multi-disciplinary. Bomford was struck by the