Formless Infinity

Clinical Explorations of Matte Blanco and Bion

Riccardo Lombardi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317395126
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Psicoanálisis

In contemporary psychoanalysis, a key concept and aim of clinical practice is to distinguish the boundaries of any mental state. Without this boundary-setting, the patient has nothing but the 'formless infinite' of primitive mental states. Formless Infinity: Clinical Explorations of Matte Blanco and Bion draws on the work of these two authors to explore how analysts can work with patients to reveal, understand and ultimately contain their primitive mental states.

Riccardo Lombardi discusses the core concepts of the unconscious, the role of the body in analysis, time and death. He displays the clinical implications of Matte Blanco's theoretical extension of Freud's theory of the unconscious, presenting numerous clinical examples of working with psychosis and other severe pathologies.

Formless Infinity, a stimulating teaching text for students, trainers and seasoned mental health practitioners, is essential reading for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists. It is particularly recommended to analysts interested in widening the scope of the analytic practice by exploring the functioning of the deep unconscious, primitive mental states, psychosomatic pathologies and psychotic conditions.

1

Emotional Experience and Infinity¹

… like the mythological two faced-Janus. Look at it from one side. You will see the patients, their emotions, their thoughts, their actions, their bi-logical structures. Look at it from the other side and you will find that all these examples are also illustrations of fundamental philosophical questions which psychoanalysis is bringing to the fore.

—Matte Blanco (1988, p. 71)

The story of the infinite is rooted in the very origins of philosophical and scientific thought. As is well known, Aristotle’s position, in response to Zeno’s paradox, was that the infinite could never be realized in fact (actual infinity) but had to remain potential (potential infinity). This is because the reality of infinity exceeds the finite capacity of thought which can only proceed bit by finite bit towards infinity without ever being able to attain it as an entity.

Only with the ‘new science’ would thinkers of the stature of Galileo and Leibniz in the modern age pose the problem of actual infinity again. They proposed infinity as a totality, as a number, as a ‘determinate quantity’. But in doing so, they came up again against those terrible paradoxes with which its structure is riven. Borges (1932/1984, p. 399) poetically called them ‘the interstices of the absurd’, testimony, he went on to say to the ‘undivided divinity which works within us’: the indivisible reality without parts, and yet infinitely divided.

In the masterpiece of his old age, Discourse on Two New Sciences, Galileo confronted the paradox that takes his name whereby the ‘squares’, a proper part of the infinite set of natural numbers, are as many as the natural numbers. Meditating on this paradox which is implicit in ‘counting’ infinity, Galileo concluded that: ‘these are among the difficulties that we encounter in talking about the infinites using our finite intellects, giving them those attributes that we give to things that are finite and determinate; this is, I believe, an error in that such attributes of being greater or less or equal are not applicable to the infinites of which it cannot be said that one is larger or smaller or the same as another.’

In an interview shortly before his death, called ‘An Infinity Within Us’, Matte Blanco said, ‘what mathematical logic hadn’t managed to work out, Freud intuited with the discovery that the unconscious does not respect the laws of classical logic, and in particular that it fails to respect its basic principle, that of non-contradiction. We are convinced that this will give rise to the possibility of a new epistemology which will in some respects reflect the laws of classical logic, and in some, those of the infinite and the unconscious. This seems to me to have been Freud’s fundamental contribution to human culture.’

It was in fact Freud (1900, 1915b) who recognized a particular function in the violation of the principle of non-contradiction. For Aristotle, this principle was his attempt to safeguard the divisibility of the world, and its violations signalled the presence of a confusional element at the heart of our logic. This is the expression of a specific modality of consciousness and meaning in part of the mind, alien to the distinguishing functions of consciousness. Freud recognized it in the apparent contradictions he encountered in his exploration of unconscious and emotional levels of mental functioning, and saw that it was not a defect which removed us from the realm of reason, which is what the concept of the irrational might suggest. The modality that it suggested was, on the contrary, no less essential to our survival than the differentiating function that we attribute to thought.

But it was Matte Blanco (1959, 1975) who, in an entirely original departure, took Freud’s intuition of a structural unconscious absolutely seriously, and applied it to the inherent significance of the logical calamities of schizophrenic patients. He attempted to delineate a logic of confusion whose basis was in the identity between part and whole, element and class, rather than in pure and simple equivalence. This is the origin – in his contact with the logical disintegration of schizophrenic patients’ experiences – of Matte Blanco’s insight about an isomorphic connection between the structure of the unconscious – which involves a violation of the principle of non-contradiction posited by Aristotle as a guarantee of the differentiating function of thought – and the structure of mathematical infinity – which Dedekind (1888/1969) defines as a set in which it is possible to establish a bi-univocal correspondence between a proper fraction and the whole. In other words, infinity and the unconscious are revealed, according to this view, as the two most remarkable human attempts to capture in the net of space and time a reality, by its very nature indivisible and unthinkable, which is at the heart of our emotional being, and which treats as a unity that which thought inevitably divides.

Matte Blanco’s bi-logic throws a powerful light on the nature of the unconscious and on that of the infinite. These two great symbolic constructions are woven together and testify to the human struggle to capture an indivisible aspect of being. This aspect is beyond any determination or predication. But it is at the same time, the source of any possible determination or predication. And the struggle is to capture it in a net whose mesh is made of time and space.

This bi-logical interweaving on which ‘indivisible being’ is founded, is also at the heart of our emotions, and here we are at the second step in Matte Blanco’s theoretical framework. It constitutes the cognitive valence of our emotions which orientates them ‘intentionally towards the world’, and it prompts Sartre, whom Matte Blanco cites, to assert that ‘what is constitutive of emotion is the fact that it takes from the object something which infinitely overflows emotion’ from the instant that, he continues, ‘every quality is conferred on an object only through a step towards the infinite’ (Matte Blanco 1988, p. 457).

Emotions, bodily experience and the infinite

Thus, the logic of the unconscious, and the logics of the infinite and of emotion reveal a surprising structural isomorphism; and the processes of symmetrization with which the emotional unconscious operates are processes of the infinitization of experience.

It was the encounter with Cantor in the 19th century that put the actual infinite back on the map and defined an ‘arithmetic of the infinite’ which ventured towards the infinite levels of the ‘trans-finite’ (aleph). Then there was the definition of infinite sets by Dedekind as those sets in which a proper part could be put into a bi-univocal correspondence with the whole. This it was that permitted Matte Blanco to respond to the apparently irresolvable internal contradiction that Galileo had noticed, and to give back to the infinite a new empirical foundation in the internal experience of the affects. It is here that the unconscious encounters the infinite because emotions structurally imply idealization, and idealization of objects or people, or of any other aspect of the environment, signifies, according to this logic, the infinitization of its characteristics or properties. This is what Sartre (1936) intuited.

We can say, with Matte Blanco, that the infinite – rooted, with its ‘paradoxes’, in our most primitive emotions which arise through corporeal experience – is in fact empirically grounded in the emotional unconscious. It is at this juncture that philosophical and epistemological thought are closely connected with clinical research, and the infinite becomes a ‘mental operator’, that colours the so-called ‘emotional mind’ and works with the ‘separate’ and ‘differentiating’ forces of our conscious, paving the way for a new definition of the relations between the unconscious and the conscious. These epistemological implications of Matte Blanco’s thinking and its relations with mathematical theory were recognized by Partenope Bion Talamo (1999), who made it the subject of his degree thesis, in which Matte Blanco’s logico-mathematical approach to the unconscious is considered in relation to W. R. Bion’s theories about ‘thinking’, starting with the seminal contributions Learning from Experience (1962) and Transformations (1965).

Our aim, in this chapter, is to explore some clinical implications of Matte Blanco’s discoveries, demonstrating a more explicit causative connection between his insights about the unconscious and the modes of mental functioning in the face of the impact of sensory data of a bodily nature, as well as in the presence of the turbulence of primitive emotions. We wish thereby to emphasize once more how it is that the unconscious and the infinite find their roots in the primitive experience of the body.

From his earliest contributions to his last work Freud (1893–95, 1911, 1915b, 1940) stressed, in a variety of ways, that the unconscious is grounded in bodily experiences and the mind has, most importantly, a ‘need for work’ (Freud 1915a) because of its connection to the body. Subsequently various authors have emphasized the relation between the body and the unconscious, including Tausk (1933), Scott (1948), Winnicott (1953), Marty (1976) and, more recently, Salomon Resnik (1979, 2001) and Armando Ferrari (2004). ‘The intimate link between biology and bi-logic’, Bria has written (1981, p. 47), indicating the connection between Resnik’s concept of the unconscious (1979) and Matte Blanco’s, ‘calls attention to a fundamental aspect of human nature, as a result of which every bi-logical structure, like every structure in our thinking, is supported by our biological equipment. Because of this inescapable link – the body-mind link – we can say that we are “body”, hence biology, even in the most abstract and spiritual of our manifestations, in that our psychological being is rooted in our instinctual needs’ (Bria 1981, p. 47). I suggested elsewhere (Lombardi 2000, 2002a) a rapprochement of Matte Blanco’s formulations on mental functioning with Armando Ferrari’s hypothesis of the eclipse of the body: both these authors underline the structural difficulty of achieving discrimination and thinkability in the face of the disturbing bio-psychological thrust of the emotions. The pressure the body exerts on mental functioning thus constitutes the one of the first structural element of infinitization, in that the mental trace in contact with the bodily matrix functions in a distinctly symmetrical way, in which the logical classes display the characteristics of infinite sets. The passage from turmoil to forms less dominated by symmetry and more varied by asymmetrical differentiation is mediated by a complex system of internal theories comparable to the vicissitudes of misconceptions in Money-Kyrle (1968) and to Bion’s transformative processes (1962). These internal private theories can function as an obstacle to the progressive asymmetrization of the emotional matrices of thought.

It should be noted that, from a technical point of view, at this depth of mental functioning a psychoanalytic approach based on systematic transference interpretation is counterproductive to the extent that, in the deep unconscious, characterized by the emergence of somatic sensations (Freud 1940), the distinction between external and internal vanishes and the analyst finds himself functioning essentially as the analysand’s counterpart, i.e. as a sort of imaginary twin (Bion 1950) who contributes significantly to the functions of containment and asymmetrization of the sensory-emotional experience that the analysand is going through (Lombardi 2002a, 2002b). In other words, when the logic of turmoil has the upper hand, the analyst performs his function by means of reverie (Bion 1962), giving precedence to the unfolding of the non-repressed unconscious and postponing to a subsequent period of the analytic working through the confrontation with the relational other, with all its attendant dynamics (Klein 1952/1975). This technical choice thus corresponds to highlighting the need to introduce the patient to himself (cf. Bion 1974, p. 40), or what Ferrari (2004) indicated as the urgent need to favour the vertical body-mind relationship, leaving the horizontal analysand-analyst relationship in the background for the moment. This emphasis on the patient’s internal functioning is intended to avoid a displacement of cathexis onto the external object, which would make it easier to dodge confronting the confusion, disorganization and internal conflict typical of the primary areas and would also increase the risk of the analysand’s resorting to compliance and imitation in his relation to the analyst (Gaddini 1969/1992). In the clinical material at the end of this article there is a clear focus on internal dynamics and a corresponding marginalization of transference interpretation. This choice should, of course, not be taken to indicate a disregard for the transference, which is still the mainstay of the analytic exchange: instead, transference interpretation is put off to phases in which the analysand has mental room for an opening to relational dynamics (Lombardi 2003). Indeed when internal turmoil and structural conflict seem to be resolved, work on the transference makes it possible to put back into perspective the symmetrization that characterized the analytic relationship, by working through the massive projective identification that can colour certain phases of analysis (Bon de Matte 1988).

Dialectic between the infinite and the finite

The step towards the infinite or infinitization comes to be constituted as a true and proper mental operator which makes possible the passage from the individual element (e) to the class to which it belongs (E), from the realm of individuals to that of classes: this is an astounding ‘logical leap’ whereby the individual, limited by time and space, is as if reabsorbed into or annulled in the infinity of the class. This is an intensive infinity, that is, one that is within finite limits which are none other than the ‘borders’ that define the class. Applied to the chain of inference that presides over human reasoning, its action is manifest as the introduction of ‘symmetrical links’ within the process of reasoning. These are areas of ‘indivision’ and so of infinitization, in which part is identical to whole, and which have the capacity to give rise to development, as is the case with delusional developments. Such developments appear completely incoherent and strange to the purely Aristotelian eye, but become perfectly legitimate and coherent to a bi-logical eye which finds reason and therefore meaning in what might otherwise seem irrational and nonsensical. Following Matte Blanco’s intuition, Bria (1999) have called such processes, marked by ‘bi-logical rationality’, affective syllogisms which are in clear competition or interaction with the better known processes of ‘Aristotelian reasoning’, bound by their respect for the principle of non-contradiction.

If we consider the world of delusional perception described so masterfully by Karl Jaspers (1959) and subsequently by Kurt Schneider (1950), we might say that ‘delusional meaning’, to use Jaspers’s suggestive term, which knocks down the whole of the sensory and perceptive system, is entirely the result of a process of infinitization which renders part equal to whole. In this way, it becomes entirely legitimate, in terms of this new meaning which invades the field of consciousness and which, in Jaspers’s words, is a radical modification in the awareness of meaning, that someone who is ill, to use his example, ‘sees uniformed people in the road and says “those are Spanish soldiers”. If he sees another uniform, he might say, “those are Turkish soldiers”, and from this might deduce “all the soldiers are concentrating here, so there must be a world war”. The same patient confronted with a few houses with scaffolding might say that the entire city must have been demolished.’ In the same way, delusional inference led a schizophrenic patient of Storch’s, much cited by Matte Blanco, to assert that opening a door, ‘he was being eaten by animals.’ The idea of being eaten by animals becomes ‘valid’ if the opening of the door is treated ‘symmetrically’ with the class of openings. In fact there is a shifting here from a particular to a general class, followed by a second shifting from a gene...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Permission acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Emotional experience and infinity
• 2 Symmetric frenzy and catastrophic change: an exploration of primitive mental states in the wake of Bion and Matte Blanco
• 3 Through the eye of the needle: the unfolding of the unconscious body
• 4 The body emerging from formless infinity
• 5 Body, adolescence and psychosis
• 6 Time in primitive mental states
• 7 Time, music and reverie
• 8 On death-life symmetrization: stubborn silences as ‘playing dead’
• 9 Death, time and psychosis
• Index