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Chapter Two Part Two – Methodology - Page 68
As well as building on the work of Foulkes (1948, 1964, 1975; Foulkes & Anthony,
1957), his successors (Brown & Zinkin, 2000; Pines, 1983), and the contributions of
Winnicott and Bion earlier in the chapter (under Psychoanalysis), group-analytic
ethnography can be integrated theoretically by including the contributions of Matte-
Blanco (1975, 1988). This integration is explained next.
Ignacio Matte-Blanco was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He was also a
mathematician, and carried out study of unconscious processes, working towards the
specification of the operation of the mind and the process of thinking in the widest sense
(including feeling). At the core of his work is the notion of bi-logic, the idea that instead
of reality just having an either/or, true/false (bivalent) nature, it also has a both/and
aspect. He identified two logics, asymmetrical (i.e. either/or) and symmetrical
(both/and). These are variously present in the bi-logic.
Matte-Blanco’s work is firmly grounded in that of Freud on the nature of the
unconscious. Matte-Blanco took the five characteristics of the unconscious outlined by
Freud (1915), and added to those a further eight he could find in Freud’s ‘The
Interpretation of Dreams’ (1900/1953), and then proceeded to explain these in relation
to a new conception of wider logical processes.
It is hard to better the introduction to Matte-Blanco’s work by Rayner and Tuckett
(1988). They use the example of Archimedes Principle as a theory that makes use of a
number of elements or concepts, and which links them together. In the same way, they
outline how Freud took a number of concepts which are the subject of his introductory
lectures (such as trauma, resistance, repression, development of the libido, regression,
formation of symptoms, and transference) and articulated these in terms of traditional