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When a book is written by several authors, the various contributions to it are usually held together by the fact that they deal with a common theme; nevertheless it sometimes happens that all the authors are inspired by the consistency of a single Master, and in such cases this fact can act as the element that holds all the contributions together and reveals a common leitmotiv in them. In this volume the leitmotiv is the same one that runs through all of I. Matte Blanco's works: the insoluble contradictions that we find in human beings between “infinatary” and “finitary” logic.
In Attention and Interpretation , Bion expressed the hope that modern mathematics would help psychoanalysis in the same way as it had helped physics. In his introduction, the editor of this volume, M. Turno starts with a quotation from Bion's work and immediately establishes the essential aspects of the problem: do we, as Bion maintains, still lack adequate numbers, or rather symbols to formulate the unconscious appropriately, or do we, as Matte Blanco believes, already possess some mathematical concepts which are suited to reformulating the laws of the unconscious and possibly to exploring others? Will we need to invent new numbers, or do the ones we have already give sufficient indication of the quality of the unconscious? Apart from this marginal difference of opinion, the two authors are substantially in agreement as regards their conception of psychoanalytic knowledge. Both are interested in whether the languages used to make the unconscious thinkable are precise or adequate enough, rather than concerning themselves with questions of method, verificability or measurement. Such languages should help us to acquire knowledge of the unconscious, thanks both to the scientific accuracy with which they describe it and to the way in which they express it.
In “Matematica dell'Inconscio e Inconscio della Matematica” (The Mathematics of the Unconscious and the Unconscious of