Ignacio Matte Blanco

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Ignacio Matte Blanco was a Chilean psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who developed a rule-based structure for the unconscious which allows us to make sense of the non-logical aspects of thought. He suggested that our thinking combines conventional logic with a different, symmetrical logic in varying degrees and he named this combination "bi-logic".

Matte Blanco studied Freud's five characteristics of the unconscious and deduced that if the unconscious has consistent characteristics it must have rules, or there would be chaos. However the nature of the charateristics indicate that the rules differ from conventional logic. In "The Unconscious as Infinite Sets" (1975) Matte Blanco proposes that the structure of the unconscious can be summarised by the principle of Generalisation and the principle of Symmetry.

Under the principle of Generalisation the unconscious perceives individual objects as members of classes or sets which are in turn grouped into more general classes. This is compatible with conventional logic. The discontinuity is introduced by the principle of Symmetry under which relationships are treated as symmetrical, or reversible. For example an asymmetrical relationship, X is greater then Y, becomes reversible so that Y is simmultaneously greater than X.

The principle of Symmetry is clearly outside of conventional logic, consequently Matte Blanco suggests that this alternative logic be called symmetrical logic.

Ignacio Matte Blanco was born on October 3rd 1908 in Santiago de Chile and died on January 11th 1995 in Rome at the age of 86. He was educated in Chile, trained in psychiatry and psychoanalysis in England and worked in the United States, Chile and Italy where his family now live.