1
The background
It is almost forty years since Ignacio Matte Blanco (1959a, b) started publishing his work using mathematical logic with psychoanalysis to investigate unconscious and emotional processes. It is about twenty since his mammoth work The Unconscious as Infinite Sets (1975) first appeared, yet he is still little known outside Italy and some parts of South America. This is not surprising, for although his writing is in many ways beautifully clear, it is definitely difficult. His precision often appears repetitive and abstruse; but there are a few of us, psychoanalysts and like-minded professionals, who have chanced upon some understanding of what Matte Blanco is driving at. A group of us in Britain has gathered together for some years and ended up convinced that psychoanalytic thinking and therapy is the poorer for having no grounding in, nor the fire of, his logical analysis. Other disciplines are also likely to be the weaker from their ignorance.
Having brought mathematical-logical intuition and analysis to bear upon psychoanalysis, Matte Blanco concluded that the mind can usefully be conceived as partly functioning by the combination of at least two distinct modes of knowing which are, however, often polarized. This he calls the bilogical point of view, which we shall soon be investigating.
Freud’s greatest contribution was probably to show the importance of unconscious processes in mental life and how they could, sometimes at least, be understood. Matte Blanco’s fundamental contribution stems from this. Freud achieved, for the first time, the definition of an array of particular characteristics of the unconscious, but they remained a rather disparate collection. Matte Blanco saw that Freud’s apparently uncoordinated array could well be understood in terms of the interaction of a very few precisely defined fundamental processes which, however, can often produce highly complex dynamic mental structures. These he calls bi-logical structures.
The advantage here is that psychoanalytic therapists who have put themselves through the initial disturbances and grasped the wide applicability and depth of bi-logic need fewer concepts to coordinate. They are thus likely to be less bewildered and freer to be imaginative when faced by the manifest complexities of a patient’s thoughts and actions. On the other hand, many busy psychoanalytic workers would say they have managed for years without such logical niceties. So there is a peculiar paradox: a few varied and more or less sane intellectuals, psychoanalysts and others find bi-logic illuminating and useful; but many more, even if they have heard of it, are baffled and probably bored.
This book aims both to find a bridge between these two views and to inform the reader about bi-logic in ordinary language. Matte Blanco found his way using formal logic. Some say he could have come to his conclusions without it; I do not think so. This book does not use chains of formal logical inference, but its final aim, like Matte Blanco’s, is to investigate the process of thinking. Here it emphasizes the essential centrality of classificatory activity at all levels of thought, even in the unconscious.
Theoretical bridging and criticism will be scattered along the way, but there is no space to be exhaustive. The first step is a brief biography which may help to understand some of the strengths and weaknesses in Matte Blanco’s presentation.
I first came across The Unconscious as Infinite Sets (1975) soon after it was published and found myself enthralled. A very few colleagues found the same enthusiasm; Margaret Arden (1984) describes this best when she says: ‘Reading The Unconscious as Infinite Sets produces an indescribable feeling of discovering the truth that one has always known but been unable to express.’
I met Matte Blanco for the first time in 1981. A slim, shortish, athletic man in his early seventies, he had a sensitive, refined patrician face, was affectionate, enthusiastic, voluble yet incisive, and used his whole body to enhance his words. He was young for his years and had a delightful sexual charm. He looked just what he was, a Latin-American aristocrat.
Matte Blanco was born in 1908 in Chile; his father was a landowner and his family was well known. He told me that a forebear was a Spanish admiral, Don Matte de Luna by name, who vanquished a Moorish fleet in the fifteenth century. Among Matte Blanco’s mother’s ancestors was Toro Zambrano, Conde de la Conquista, Captain-General and President of the Chilean Province of the Spanish Empire. So too was Blanco Encalada, the first President of the Chilean Republic early in the nineteenth century. Matte Blanco also mentioned with sceptical amusement, yet demure pride, that a Spanish genealogist had told him that his family name indicated that he was descended from one of the sons of Mohammed.
He was warm, passionate, precise and logical all at the same time. He was in no way arrogant, but when thwarted he could go into tyrannical rages. He was enormously emotional and sentimental, many would say excessively so. He once said: ‘Ah, you must understand that I am a Latin and thus naturally very emotional, but I have at the same time a love of being severely logical and mathematical. When I was about five I remember my father christening me what in English would be “little hairsplitter”. That really explains the whole nature of the work of my life—the bringing of logic and the emotions together.’ This book hopes to carry forward this aim.
Matte Blanco was a great sentimentalist. He thus loved to honour the traditions and customs of other people—but particularly those of Spain, Chile and his family. Perhaps the tradition he followed most passionately was the psychoanalytic one of the early Freud at the beginning of the twentieth century.
At the age of 20 he graduated in medicine at the University of Chile in Santiago and became an associate professor of physiology by the time he was 25. However, he was soon intrigued by psychiatry, and psychoanalysis in particular. His father persuaded him that England was the only place to study. So in the mid-1930s he went to London and trained at the Institute of Psychiatry and at the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. His analyst was Walter Schmideberg, a Viennese of the classical school but also the husband of Melitta Schmideberg. She was Melanie Klein’s daughter but later was bitterly opposed to her mother. His teachers were the remarkably creative British group of those years under Ernest Jones—Rickman, Sharpe, Isaacs, Strachey, Glover, Payne, Brierley, Riviere and Klein herself. He was lifelong friends with John Bowlby and Paula Heimann. As a Member of the British PsychoAnalytical Society, he more recently considered himself to be one of its ‘Independents’, but most of all he was international in spirit. In many ways most significant for him was Melanie Klein; she ranked second only to Freud in his theoretical estimation. Matte Blanco’s admiration for the theories of these two together, above all other analysts, lay possibly in their clear-eyed view of the dark side of the human mind. He knew that their pessimism was essential but probably felt that his special talent did not lie in their sort of cool view.
In the 1930s he also began to study mathematical logic intensively, particularly that of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica (1910). In 1940 he sailed back to America where he spent the next four years; he married his first wife, whom he had met in England, and had a daughter. He devoted himself to psychoanalysis and psychiatry, first at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore then at Duke University, North Carolina, and at the Medical Center in New York. He continued his logical studies, being a member of Courant’s famous weekly seminar in the mathematics department at Columbia University.
In the mid-1940s he returned to Chile and accepted the Chair of Psychiatry at the University of Chile. As Professor of Psychiatry he was administrative head of the department and an inexhaustible reformer. His planning of modern clinics for psychotic patients became a model for much of South America. He was a strict and demanding teacher, but was held in affection and respect by many.
His gift for sympathetic knowledge of people in the throes of psychosis emerges in his books, and came largely from years of clinical work in the psychiatry department of the medical school of the University of Chile in Santiago. At the same time he was a main founder of the Chilean PsychoAnalytical Society. In the 1950s he and his first wife divorced, but a few years later he remarried and had another six children, forming the large family he desired, in line with the South American tradition of the time.
This romantic and rather conservative man had become a profound and radical reformer of his profession in the Chile of the 1950s. However, he wanted to continue his own particular creativity, and in 1966 moved to Italy with his family and became a training analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society. He was also invited by the Chairman of Psychiatry at the Catholic University of Rome to teach at the Postgraduate School, where he could continue his studies and psychoanalytic work without administrative burdens. Luciana Bon de Matte, his second wife, was Kleinian trained and is now a well-known training analyst in Rome. The members of the family mostly live in Italy now. Clever, serious, open-minded and strikingly multi-lingual, they are also memorable for their warm and unassuming generosity.
Many aspects of present-day professional and national political issues seemed hardly to touch Matte Blanco during his later years. His leaving Chile for Rome was felt as a desertion by some of the younger generation there who had followed him in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. He was aware of this and troubled by it, but was unswerving in devoting himself to his ideas which he felt were the most important things he had to give.
It has been noticed that when he could not achieve his aims by charm he would resort to noisy demands that can best be described as temper-tantrums. Some disliked this characteristic; others felt an affectionate tolerance and respect in spite of these foibles, for he was often in the right when in a temper.
The effect, for good or ill, of his sentimentality together with his intransigent single-mindedness also emerges in his writing. It is here, as strength and weakness, that readers will naturally be affected by Matte Blanco’s particularly passionate character. For instance, when he was utterly engrossed in a conceptual argument of great originality within his own mind, each thought was diamond-clear, but when less sure he was prone to forget that he was writing for others and began to leap incomprehensibly and repetitively as if talking only to himself The poor reader, unable to follow, unaware of the adventure of ideas and bored by the repetition, is left angry and helpless—and is then likely to throw the book aside.
Another example of his apparent loss of interest in the reader’s capacity is especially evident in The Unconscious as Infinite Sets. Here he attempted the near impossible: he wanted his readership to include both psychoanalysts and mathematicians. The result was that most psychoanalysts recoiled from his punctilious formal logic, while mathematicians also rebuffed him, not only for apparent faults in logical consistency, but because his psychoanalysis was too emotional and imprecise for their taste.
His passionate loyalty, which can be conservative sentimentality, has great strengths as well as weaknesses. For instance, as this book unfolds you will find how Matte Blanco felt strongly and clearly that Freud’s finest genius flowered just before the turn of the century. He thinks that The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), with its spelling out of the nature of unconscious processes, was his greatest contribution to humanity. Probably all psychoanalysts would agree here. Matte Blanco goes on from this to adjudge that psychoanalysis has slipped away from these insights and has somewhat lost its way since then. This challenging view contains an important truth; however, he does not properly examine this with respect to the manifold psychoanalytic ideas that have emerged in the ninety-odd years since then. These ideas, though flawed in places, make up the evolution of a marvellous living network of theory by which we all work and which has liberalized our culture in many ways. We can be proud of this achievement; Matte Blanco seems often to ignore it.
His particular criticisms of later psychoanalytic theorists are usually justified, and he never attacks beyond making useful points. He was never given to derision of another writer’s theory. Personal malice and pious contempt, frequently psychoanalytic diseases, were not Matte Blanco’s vices. In fact his ideas do not contradict the fundamentals of psychoanalytic theory, ancient or modern; but they do add a new dimension to it. Matte Blanco felt amazed that he had been privileged to discover a conceptual Eldorado.
The main point here is to warn readers that Matte Blanco can appear to ignore vital later aspects of psychoanalytic knowledge. There is little interest in developmental matters. Ideas about evolution through phases of oral, anal, phallic, Oedipal and genital zones, together with latency, puberty and later maturity, seldom appear in his theory, even though they are always evident in his technique. Apart from repression, projective identification and denial, concepts of defence are not examined in detail. Analysis of the individual self and of a particular character, together with clinical stories about them, seem of little interest in his theoretical writing. Nor is there much evidence of a study of specific neurotic syndromes, or of perversion and delinquency. Also, the relation of psychoanalysis to biology, and particularly to evolution, seems oddly absent for a former physiologist. Apart from Freud, the writer to whom much attention is given is Melanie Klein. Even here he seems to ignore such things as the vital features of the depressive position as compared with the paranoidschizoid.
His most serious omission in many eyes would be his portrayal of clinical material. He had a vast experience from fifty years of psychoanalysing and nearly as long supervising. If one reads between the lines of his slightly stiff (in English) clinical descriptions, there is a beautiful and imaginative use of classical technique. He often used case material to illustrate his theoretical writing, but in a way that some clinicians find unsatisfactory. This is partly because his English is rather formal and not idiomatic. But few recognize this, mostly because he is not aiming to tell fascinating clinical stories about characterological predicaments and the personal intimate pains and dramas of a single patient and analyst. He seldom introduces you to a unique patient standing centre stage with his or her problems and vices. Matte Blanco’s strength lies in his reflective perception at a more microscopic level—in the tiny detail of interwoven thoughts. His theoretical vision comes rushing forward so that overall pictures of patient and analyst are irrelevant to what is being considered.
Some have dismissed his clinical sensitivity on this basis. This is understandable, but wrong; quite apart from his vital theoretical contribution, patients have attested that he was remarkably sensitive to them individually. He could also be astutely tough yet kind. Perhaps he lacked confidence in the art of storytelling, or had indulged himself too little in reading and learning from biography and novels. On the other hand, psychoanalysts might value clinical storytelling too exclusively, but it is certainly on his gift for penetrating conceptual precision and the abstract generality of his theoretical contribution that Matte Blanco must be judged.
Matte Blanco’s attitude to logic was similar to that towards psychoanalytic theory. He devoted himself passionately to both and developed his original ideas out of two great conceptual breakthroughs, one from each region of thought: Freud at the turn of the century and Russell and Whitehead at about the same time. Then, just as analysts can complain that their recent theory is neglected, he also appears to have neglected the important work of more recent logicians such as the Model theory of the 1950s stemming from Alfred Tarski. It was this later development that Bion mostly used (Skelton 1989, 1990a, 1992). Though very different in character, Bion and Matte Blanco used formal logic with deep conviction; they knew and respected each other. In fact Bion’s daughter has written a thesis upon their respective uses of logic (Bion-Talamo 1973).
An accident in 1990 left his brain severely damaged so that his memory was irremediably impaired. It was dreadful for him and for his family. Very occasionally, something magical happened, and for a few seconds his mind was clear and great again, with its old kindly emotionality and consistent logicality. It was soon gone, but was enough to remind his friends of a triumph of one human spirit. Matte Blanco died in 1995.
This book is no substitute for the original work. Being an elementary introduction it brushes aside many lines of thought which are investigated exhaustively by Matte Blanco’s meticulous mind. The very value of the approach we are considering rests first upon a surrender to, then argument with, and finally use of precise thoughtfulness. The best way to achieve this facility is by tackling Matte Blanco himself. Read him when you have finished this book.
