2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
Another undeservedly forgotten name, more precisely, in Russia never particularly sounded - Ignacio Matte Blanco (Ignacio Matte Blanco). Chilean psychoanalyst who lived, in addition to Chile, also in Great Britain and Italy.
By education - a psychiatrist, in the 40s. trained and studied in the UK, including at the London Institute of Psychoanalysis. In 1946, after returning from Great Britain, he founded the Center for Psychoanalytic Research in Chile, and in 1949 - the Chilean Psychoanalytic Association. In 1966 he moved from Chile to Italy, where he lived until his death in 1995.
It was during the Italian period that he wrote his main works: "The Unconscious as an Infinite Set" (1975), "Think, Feel and Be. Critical Reflections on the Fundamental Antinomy of Man and the World”(1988) and a number of others.
On June 23, 2017, in St. Petersburg, the English psychoanalyst Ion Mordant gave a short lecture on Ignacio Matta Blanco and some aspects of his theory. I would like to highlight three memorable moments: the idea of subjective experience of the infinity of unconscious processes, the principles of symmetry of thinking in the unconscious and asymmetry of thinking of the ego, as well as psychotherapy as a movement from injustice to justice.
I will try to reproduce how I understood these three ideas.
The first idea is the subjective experience of the infinity of the processes occurring in the unconscious. Depression, for example, can be experienced by the patient (and is usually experienced) as an endless process. This is what gives the depth of the patient's despair and suffering. He does not think in this way - ok, today I am depressed, I will be in it until the evening, and tomorrow morning it will end, and with renewed vigor I will get down to business. No, it seems to him that this depression will always be, that it is endless. This is exactly how the unconscious process of thinking works - everything is infinite and simultaneously, at the same time.
Otherwise, time is experienced in the unconscious. This can be seen very well in dreams - where events from the past, present and future take place simultaneously. In a dream, for example, deceased relatives may be present, interacting in dream events with figures from the present, or even present in events that our unconscious still only anticipates, that is, in the future. Time in the unconscious is timeless, and in this it is infinite - has no extension.
The second idea, or rather a whole theory, is the symmetry of the unconscious. In the unconscious, the part becomes equal to the whole. If you depict two circles on a sheet of paper - one twice as large as the other, then each of these circles has an infinite number of points inside. And it doesn't matter which one is bigger, because each of them is infinite. That is, if for us conscious, our perceiving self, the difference between the circles is obvious - one is larger than the other, then for the unconscious, operating with infinite sets and an infinite number of objects - there is no difference between them, they are the same.
A patient with schizophrenia in a clinic (Jon gave these examples) may, for example, claim that his hand is himself. That is, the part has become equal to the whole, the hand is equal to the entire body - such is unconscious thinking. Or, for example, the patient claims that the dog he has left at home is constantly thinking about him. It is clear that in fact the opposite is true - it is he who thinks about the dog. But in his unconscious mind he himself thinking about a dog and a dog thinking about him are identical and symmetrical phenomena - they are one and the same. While the I (ego) thinks asymmetrically - compares, thinks over the sequence of actions, separates part from the whole, etc.
The third thesis: the process of therapy is a movement from the experience of injustice to justice. The patient's main suffering is the experience of injustice. Relatives, bosses, the world as a whole were and are unfair to him. Traumatic childhood memories of the same - I was treated unfairly, not the way I deserve it. And therapy through living the grievance from injustice, through its reaction, expanding the picture of the situation, seemingly unfair, etc. helps to realize both specific events and the world as a whole as being organized quite reasonably and, in general, just.
Of course, all of the above is just a tiny piece of the theoretical legacy left to us by Matte Blanco, his intellectual penetration into the mechanisms of the psyche. I was unable to find Matte Blanco's books published in Russian, apparently, in Russia he was never translated. Although his legacy is very interesting, especially given the growing interest in the work of Wilfred Bion, his theory of thinking, with which Matte Blanco's theory has many similarities.
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