Ignacio Matte Blanco
| Igniacio Matte Blanco | |
|---|---|
| Born |
3 October 1908 Santiago Chile |
| Died | 11 January 1995 (aged 86) Rome, Italy |
| Citizenship | Italian |
| Nationality | Chilean |
| Fields | Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, Symbolic Logic |
| Institutions | Maudsley Hospital, British Psychoanalytical Society, Johns Hopkins University, Duke University, Chilean Society of Psychoanalysts, Istituto di Psicoanalisi di Roma, University of the Sacred Heart, Rome |
| Alma mater | Pontifical Catholic University of Chile |
| Known for | Bi-logic: Application of Logic to psychoanalysis |
| Influences | James Strachey, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion |
| Notable awards | |
| Spouse | Luciana Bon de Matte (1931-2012) |
| Children | one daughter, four sons |
Ignacio Matte Blanco (October 3, 1908 Santiago (Chile)– January 11, 1995 Rome) was a Chilean psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who developed a logic-based explanation for the operation of the unconscious, and for the non-logical aspects of experience. In applying the complexity and paradoxes of mathematical logic to psychoanalysis, he pioneered a coherent way of understanding the clinical situation. He has an international following that includes: physicists, mathematicians, cyber-scientists, psychologists, mathematical philosophers, neuroscientists, theologians, linguistics and literary scholars.
Matte Blanco was educated in Chile and qualified there as a medical doctor. He entered psychoanalysis with Fernando Allende Navarro, Latin America's first qualified psychoanalyst. Having moved to London in 1933, he trained in psychiatry at South London's Maudsley Hospital and in psychoanalysis at the British Psychoanalytical Society where he was supervised by Anna Freud and James Strachey, becoming a member of the British Society in 1938. He subsequently worked in the United States, from 1940. He returned to Chile in 1946 where he co-founded the Psychoanalytic Society. In 1966 he travelled to Italy, never to return to his homeland. He settled in Rome with his family. He died there at the age of 86.
Matte Blanco's hypothesis proposes that in the unconscious "a part can represent the whole" and that "past, present, and future are all the same"'. He set out to examine the five characteristics of the unconscious that Freud had outlined: timelessness, displacement, condensation, replacement of external by internal reality, and absence of mutual contradiction. Matte Blanco hypothesized the nature of unconscious logic, as opposed to conscious logic. He deduced that if the unconscious has consistent characteristics it must follow rules, or there would be chaos. However the nature of these hypothetical characteristics indicates that their rules differ from conventional logic.
...
Wikipedia