Thinking, Feeling, and Being

Ignacio Matte-Blanco

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134986613
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Ignacio Matte-Blanco has made one of the most original contributions to psychoanalysis since Freud.

In this book, which includes an introductory chapter to his work by Eric Rayner and David Tuckett, he develops his conceptualization of the Freudian unconscious in terms of logic and mathematics, giving many clinical examples.

Part One

The Subject

1

An Introduction to Matte-Blanco’s Reformulation of the Freudian Unconscious and his Conceptualization of the Internal World

by Eric Rayner and David Tuckett

1 The Freudian Unconscious

Over the past thirty years Ignacio Matte-Blanco has been developing a fundamentally new way of conceiving conscious and unconscious processes which we believe is of enormous importance to the practising psychoanalyst and to the more academic scholar of the mind and its processes. However, the particular discipline of his arguments may be strange to the psychoanalyst, just as his psychoanalysis may be new to the mere academically minded. He works with one arm, as it were, in psychoanalysis and the other in the concepts of basic mathematical logic and he is definitely not an easy read. In helping him to prepare his manuscript for publication we had the opportunity to read this book in draft and to talk to him a good deal. So in this chapter we are aiming not to give a critical survey but to help the reader unfamiliar with his thinking to appreciate his more central and elementary ideas. Most of these were addressed by Matte-Blanco in his first volume in English, The Unconscious as Infinite Sets (1975a). Other concepts appear for the first time in English later in this book. Our brief notes are of course no substitute for a grasp of these works.¹

Matte-Blanco’s starting point is the way Freud conceived unconscious thought. That Freud’s conception of the unconscious was a momentous step is widely accepted, at least among those who value the study of humanity’s subjective world. But Matte-Blanco believes that both psychoanalysts and those interested in applying psychoanalysis to other aspects of thought have never truly and fully made use of its revolutionary impact. His main purpose has been to show, by reformulating some of Freud’s ideas about unconscious processes by the use of quite simple mathematical logic, just how revolutionary and valuable psychoanalytic insights are.

The idea of an unconscious side to human life was not, of course, unique to Freud.² Freud’s special contribution was to formulate how unconscious thinking worked and also to draw attention to the implications that it operated with a systematic structure of its own. He argued, for example, that ‘The governing rules of logic carry no weight in the unconscious; it might be called the Realm of the Illogical’ (SE 23:168–9) and that ‘We have found that processes in the unconscious or in the Id obey different laws from those in the preconscious ego. We name these laws in their totality the primary process, in contrast to the secondary process which governs the course of events in the preconscious in the ego’ (1940 [1938a], SE 23:164).

Freud clearly drew attention to the importance he attached to his recognition of the different logic of the unconscious. He formulated this in detail in The Interpretation of Dreams. Of this work he wrote that it ‘contains, even according to my present-day judgement, the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make. Insight such as this falls to one’s lot but once in a lifetime’ (SE 4:xxxii). Here, it is most likely that he was referring to his ideas about the logical characteristics of the unconscious as they emerged from his formulation of the language of the dream thoughts. He wrote that

‘The dream-thoughts and the dream-content are presented to us like two versions of the same subject-matter in two different languages. Or, more properly, the dream-content seems like a transcript of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, whose characters and syntactic laws it is our business to discover by comparing the original and the translation. The dream- thoughts are immediately comprehensible, as soon as we have learnt them. The dream-content, on the other hand, is expressed as it were in a pictographic script, the characters of which have to be transposed individually into the language of the dream-thoughts.’ (SE 4:277)

The unconscious domain, which Freud formulated, is accessible through the world of our dreams and of childhood thinking. It is a world in which the ordinary concepts of cause and effect, time, and space, to mention but a few of its characteristics, are turned on their head. In our dreams, when being highly emotional, or as children, we think what is unthinkable or nonsensical in other waking or conscious life. Inconvenient as it may be, the relationship between .the events and experiences of psychic reality and the material world is not that of ordinary science and logic. It is here that psychoanalysis makes a unique contribution to human understanding.

In Matte-Blanco’s view neither psychoanalysts nor others that use it have really pursued Freud’s fundamental discovery about the unconscious and its logic. Instead, attention has been directed too exclusively to debating or modifying Freud’s ‘strange’ ideas about sexuality, the death instinct, or similar subjects. Or it has gone into formulating psychoanalysis in ways which tame the revolutionary characteristics of the Freudian unconscious. Many analysts have not taken seriously enough the idea that the mind works within a framework of timelessness and spacelessness. Nor have they investigated the fundamental properties which permit the processes of condensation, displacement, projection, introjection, and so on. As a result, they have not understood what the consequences of these must be for thinking processes. Analysts have tended not to consider the matter or have moved their discipline towards conventional psychology and conventional logic.

Although the logic of the unconscious is used intuitively in daily clinical work, we do not often stop to consider the fundamental and disturbing implications of the concepts employed. Timelessness, for instance, is implied in clinical work when the co-presence of adulthood and infancy in the same person is taken for granted. But the wider implications of such an idea, as to what it might mean for a patient’s thought processes in general, for instance, are not pursued.

Matte-Blanco feels that theoreticians have often moved psychoanalysis away from the unconscious. For example, the American psychoanalyst H.Hartmann did much to gain psychoanalysis a more respectable place in scientific psychology. But Freud’s revolutionary discoveries about the nature of the unconscious played no real part in Hartmann’s systematization of psychoanalysis as a science. He argues much the same about a recent attempt to systematize the theories of Melanie Klein. De Bianchedi et al. (1984), for example, discuss Klein’s work in terms of positional, economic, spatial, and dramatic points of reference but in doing so seem to lose the impact of what she was saying. In their formulation Klein’s work becomes too tidy, ever so rational—the same effect, some feel, Hartmann had on Freud. Matte-Blanco could find only one sentence in which the irrational Freudian unconscious is implied, and even there rather timidly and ambiguously. In it the authors say: ‘Both the ego and its objects can be alternately or simultaneously spectators or protagonists of the drama’ (De Bianchedi et al. 1984:396). He points out that if instead of writing ‘or’ they had put ‘and’ things would have been different. They would have been doing justice to the idea of the coexistence of incompatibles in the unconscious. In other ways the authors’ ideas are serious and valuable, but their use of ‘or’ renders ordinary something which is extraordinary to conscious thought. It is in subtle ways like this that psychoanalysis loses the Freudian unconscious. In some ways it thus loses an essence of psychoanalysis itself.

Klein never says so explicitly but only a brief acquaintance with The Psycho-Analysis of Children (1932) makes one aware that the ideas in her book are inconceivable without Freud’s conception of the unconscious. Almost every page is filled with observations about children and their thought processes which are a living testimony to this. The thoughts of the children observed by Melanie Klein are replete with the logic of the unconscious and cannot be understood without it. Matte-Blanco suggests that although she did not pay that much attention to the abstract formulation of her theories she was the most creative and original of all those who have drawn inspiration from Freud. Her famous concept of projective identification, for example, which he deals with later in this book, is inconceivable without the framework of Freud’s characteristics of the unconscious.

The rationalizing process is encountered very frequently in psychoanalytical literature. It is as apparent in the ‘object-relations school’ as in the more traditional classical metapsychology. For these reasons Matte-Blanco believes he has been right to say that ‘psychoanalysis has wandered away from itself (Matte-Blanco 1975a:10). He remembers that there is a story of a man who entered a bar and began to walk up the vertical wall, arriving at the ceiling. He walked along it, head down, then went down the opposite wall. He sat down and asked for a whisky mixed with beer. People were astonished. When he finished drinking, he paid, and repeated the same journey in the opposite direction. When he closed the door somebody observed: ‘What a strange man: to drink whisky mixed with beer!’ Matte-Blanco feels that his purpose is to try to recover the essentials of Freud’s contribution.

Two-Valued or Bivalent Logic

To show just how revolutionary and important Freud’s formulation of the unconscious was, Matte-Blanco has examined some very obvious everyday propositions of the kind that are fundamental to ordinary, contemporary, logical, and scientific thought. He does this in order to demonstrate the existence of some hidden assumptions in ordinary thought which are often ignored.

He takes a physical proposition, Archimedes’ Principle, as an example. This principle, which led him to cry out his famous ‘Eureka’, states that ‘a body immersed in a liquid loses as much of its weight as the weight of the liquid which it has displaced’ (Nelkon 1981:106). What concepts and processes are employed in order to state this principle? Archimedes certainly had to draw on those of solid body, liquid, immersion, weight, volume, and difference of weight. He then established the various very definite relations between these concepts. It would take too long a time here to isolate and describe in a precise way all the concepts implied in the principle. For our purposes you need only reflect about a few of them and verify that the following underlying concepts are all, among others, essential to the principle:

1. the principle of identity—A is identical to A;
2. the concept of two-valued or bivalent logic—either A or not A (either proposition A is true or it is not true);
3. the principle of formal contradiction—two contradictory assertions cannot both be true at the same time;
4. the principle of incompatibility—A cannot be different from and totally equal to B; for example, A cannot be liquid and solid at the same time and under the same conditions;
5. the operation of subtraction—if a part is subtracted from a given, positive quantity, the result is a smaller quantity.

These are selected because they will be referred to, one way or another, later. Research findings in the natural sciences normally respect these and other related rules. Put briefly, scientific knowledge is expressed in language submitting to the laws of bivalent or twovalued logic.

Likewise, psychoanalytical research and formulation have also developed largely in conformity with two-valued logic. Thus Freud’s writing and argument are quite clearly structured with respect for the principles and rules of bivalent logic. This is emphasized by the construction of such a work as his Introductory Lectures (1916–17). In his editorial introduction to this work, Strachey (SE 15:6) makes the following comments about all of Freud’s lectures: ‘they almost always had a definite form—a head, body and tail—and might often give the hearer the impression of possessing an aesthetic unity’. Each subject Freud tackles in the lectures is organized in a systematic way. Concepts such as trauma, resistance, repression, development of the libido, regression, form-ation of symptoms, and transference are all formulated with full respect to the laws of this bivalent logic. These laws furnish the framework where the concepts develop, and without them no understanding of the concepts is possible.

However, it is not only the structure of Freud’s argument which respects bivalent logic. The concepts themselves are permeated by the same approach. Take, for instance, the concept of repression. This entails an opposition, in the mind, between two incompatibles: a tendency to satisfy a wish and a psychical organization which tends to block the realization of this satisfaction. In the case of a trauma the struggle again would be between two incompatibles: between the tendency to remember the traumatic event, face it, and bring it to full light, and a tendency to keep the peace by preventing access to consciousness. This is described and formulated by Freud in terms of two-valued logic.

Matte-Blanco is thus stressing that psychoanalysis, like philosophy and the natural sciences, has been conceived and developed in the territory where respect for the principles and rules of bivalent logic is essential. But at the same time psychoanalysis can usefully be conceived as a unique undertaking. As we have mentioned, it sets out to study the special characteristics of unconscious ideas, and in doing so makes a radically new addition to scientific and logical thinking. To unfold his argument, Matte-Blanco starts by considering Freud’s ideas about the characteristics of the unconscious to draw out their radical nature. We will now turn to this.

The Characteristics of the Unconscious

Let us begin by listing the unconscious processes Freud identified when trying to understand the language of the unconscious. In his paper ‘The Unconscious’ (SE 14) he sums up what he considers to be its nature in five characteristics. In The Interpretation of Dreams Matte-Blanco has found eight others. A more thorough survey of Freud’s writings and those of other psychoanalysts might reveal still more. However, the thirteen characteristics of unconscious functioning that have been found in this way are as follows.

In ‘The Unconscious’:

1. The absence of mutual contradiction and negation (SE 14:186).
2. Displacement (SE 14:186).
3. Condensation (SE 14:186).
4. Timelessness (SE 14:187).
5. The replacement of external by internal reality (SE 14:187).
   In The Interpretation of Dreams:
6. The co-presence of contradictories (SE 4:312).
7. The alternation between absence and presence of temporal succession (SE 4:314).
8. Logical connection reproduced as simultaneity in time (SE 4:314).
9. Causality as succession (SE 4:314–16).
10. Equivalence-identity and conjunction of alternatives (SE 4:316, 318).
11. Similarity (SE 4:319–20).
12. The co-presence in dreams of thinking and not-thinking (SE 4:313).
13. The profound disorganization of the structure of thinking (SE 4:312).

Matte-Blanco uses Freud’s own writing to describe what he had in mind by each of these processes; he then makes some general remarks.

By the absence of mutual contradiction and negation Freud refers to a mode of thinking which is quite foreign to what has been termed bivalent logic. He argues that There are in this system [the unconscious] no negation, no doubt, no degrees of certainty’ (SE 14:186) and that ‘The logical laws of thought do not apply in the id, and this is true above all of the law of contradiction’ (SE 22:73). Elsewhere, the same point is made in the language of the drives; instinctual impulses are said to exist side by side and to be exempt from mutual contradiction.³ The revolutionary implications of such thinking are apparent when one realizes that if there is no mutual contradiction or negation one cannot distinguish, for instance, ‘A is white’ from ‘A is not white’, or from ‘I am not sure whether A is white or not’. If there are no degrees of certainty, all shades of meaning disappear. Under such circumstances, perhaps all one could know is something like ‘there is an idea about whiteness’.

The notions of displacement and condensation also refer to a mode of thinking quite foreign to bivalent logic. They imply an unusual spatial geometry. By displacement Freud refers to the way an idea’s emphasis, interest, or intensity is liable to be detached from it and to become superimposed on to other ideas. By condensation he refers to the way several chains of association, several ideas, may be expressed through a single idea. As he himself put it: ‘By the process of displacement one idea may surrender to another its whole quota of cathexis; by the process of condensation it may appropriate the whole cathexis of several other ideas’ (SE 14:186).

Freud illustrates this process of condensation in The Interpretation of Dreams:

‘They were concealed behind the dream figure of ‘Irma’, which was thus turned into a collective image with, it must be admitted, a number of contradictory characteristics. Irma became the representative of all these other figures which had been sacrificed to the work of condensation, since I passed over to her, point by point, everything that reminded me of them. There is another way in which a “collective figure” can be produced for purposes of dream- condensation, namely by uniting the actual features of two or more people into a single dream-image.… Dr R. in my dream about my uncle with the yellow beard… was a similar composite figure. But in his case the dream-image was constructed in yet another way. I did not combine the features of one person with those of another and in the process omit from the memory-picture certain features of each of them. What I did was to adopt the procedure by means of which Galton produced family portraits: namely by projecting two images on to a single plate, so that certain features common to both are emphasized, while those which fail to fit in with one another cancel one another out and are indistinct in the picture. In my dream about my u...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part One The Subject
• Part Two Projection, Introjection, and Internal World
• Part Three Projective and Intrqjective Processes: a Bilogical Point of View
• Part Four Symmetrical Frenzy, Bi-Logical Frenzy, and Bi-Modal Frenzy
• Part Five Towards the Future
• Appendix An Account of Melanie Klein's Conception of Projective Identification
• Bibliography
• Index