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In his Book Review of “The Unconscious as Infinite Sets: An Essay in Bi-Logic”, Henry Rey (1976) gave a clinical example of the usefulness of Matte-Blanco’s ideas for deeper understanding psychotic thought construction, describing Matte-Blanco’s example of a schizophrenic woman. After the blood was drawn from her arm, the woman suffering from delusion, complained, that at times the blood had been taken from her arm and at other times that her arm had been taken away. This was an expression of a well-known schizophrenic way of thinking, the identity/equivalence and complete reciprocity and interchangeability of the part and the whole. Matte-Blanco’s second book: “Thinking, Feeling and Being” (1988) presents a further evolution of his ideas about the unconscious, its laws, and their application to psychoanalytic work. The infinity of the unconscious and the notion of combinations in different proportions of asymmetrical and symmetrical thought reflecting a stratification of layers between conscious and the deepest unconscious levels opens a new way to understand the psyche. The deepest unconscious , which Freud said would be unfathomable, contains only symmetry , where everything is equal to everything else. This constitutes the absolute ‘indivisible mode’. Freud’s death instinct can thus be reformulated as the cessation of thought: if everything is equal to everything else, there cannot be thought. Conversely, if in a state of absolute asymmetry, everything is different from everything else, and no connections or associations can be made and objects are closed in a category of oneness, no thought process can take place either. Matte- Blanco’s conclusion was that psychic processes can only occur when both asymmetrical and symmetrical thought processes are present . The concepts of conscious and unconscious are reformulated in terms of bi-logic and stratification of the mind. This led Matte-Blanco to extensive exploration of Klein’s concept of projective identification in terms of symmetrical logic. Through this lens, projective identification is viewed as a bi-logically structured manifestation of both symmetrical and asymmetrical thinking. Matte-Blanco’s ideas of Symmetrization and Infinitization are clinically explicated by Erick Rayner (1981, 1995) who founded the London Bi-Logic Group. Elucidating and further developing Matte-Blanco’s Theory of Emotions and the Theory of Unconscious Logic, he writes further on symmetrization in the realm of feeling, where subject and object tend to become undifferentiated or reversible, and where affects tend to ‘infinitize’. Symmetrization cannot permit any kind of mental development and the obvious consequence is a infinitization process, a no end repetition . An example of infinitization of symmetrization might be a case of erotic impulses infinitizing under the push of intense anxieties: a man who is involved in succession or simultaneously with a ‘set’ of women in a ‘womanizing frenzy’, feverishly substituting previous passionate encounters with the last one ‘of the set’ with new ones. After the ecstasy, when he feels total fusion, he quickly departs to meet the next girl; at this level of symmetrization the women are interchangeable. He himself falls into a sort of infinitized, hypnotic-like trance upon women’s beauty, which is experienced as mutually empowering. Upon further exploration, it becomes apparent that this erotic structure serves as a life-saving outlet for intense claustrophobic anxieties in his business activities and his married life. But,
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