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.
Dr. Margaret Arden is an associate member of the Independent Group in the British Psycho-Analytical Society and gravitates toward their openness to ideas from other disciplines. It is her thesis that only receptivity to new ideas can enable a necessary reformulation of Freud's ideas and free psychoanalysis from its nineteenth-century mechanistic Cartesian constrictions. Dr. Arden's goal is psychic truth, and she states it can be found in religion as well as in psychoanalysis, the analyst as midwife to insight, which in her view is symbolically equivalent to religion's enlightenment.
The eight papers that comprise this book begin with a complex, demanding first paper. It is a journey into the thinking of Gregory Bateson (1973) and Ignacio Matte Blanco (1975), both of whom build upon Bertrand Russell's (1903) theory of logical types. Bateson's double-bind thesis arises when verbal and nonverbal components of a communication are contradictory and create confusion. Matte Blanco's ideas on “bi-logic” are close to Freud's primary and secondary process, Arden states that using the mathematics of finite and infinite sets (borrowed from Russell) it is possible to describe “symmetrical” (primary process) and “asymmetrical” (secondary process) thinking. Arden feels these concepts inform our dealing with the clinical situation in new