Ignacio Matte Blanco - Unconscious

Unconscious

'Matte Blanco (1975) started by analyzing the five characteristics of the unconscious that Freud outlined: timelessness, displacement, condensation, replacement of external by internal reality, and absence of mutual contradiction'. He deduced that if the unconscious has consistent characteristics it must have rules, or there would be chaos. However the nature of the characteristics indicate that the rules differ from conventional logic, and Matte Blanco was fruitfully to explore the nature of unconscious, as opposed to conscious, logic.

In The Unconscious as Infinite Sets Matte Blanco proposes that the structure of the unconscious can be summarised by the principle of Generalisation and the principle of Symmetry, Matte Blanco's 'two principles: 1) The principle of Generalization: Unconscious logic does not take account individuals as such, it deals with them only as members of classes, and of classes of classes. 2) The principle of Symmetry: The Unconscious can treat the converse of any relation as identical to it; that is, it deals with relationships as symmetrical'.

While the principle of Generalisation might be compatible with conventional logic, discontinuity is introduced by the principle of Symmetry under which relationships are treated as symmetrical, or reversible. Whereas 'asymmetrical thinking distinguishes individuals from one another by the relationship between them....reality testing, symmetrical thinking, by contrast, sees relations as holding indiscriminately across a field of individuals'. For example an asymmetrical relationship, X is greater than Y, becomes reversible so that Y is simultaneously greater than X. Matte Blanco draws here on 'Klein's understanding that "I am angry (with a person or thing)" is very close to "Someone or something is very angry with me"'; and indeed he suggests that 'she was the most creative and original of all those who have drawn inspiration from Freud', highlighting in particular 'her famous concept of projective identification'.

For Matte Blanco, then, "unconsciousness" is marked by 'what he called symmetry, where there is a preferring of sameness and concomitantly an implicit aversion to difference, while the quality of ego-functioning is the registering and bearing of difference, which he called asymmetry '.