IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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not only the unconscious) seems to have no knowledge of time – living in an eternal present, incapable of using their past experience » (2002, p 64). Another contribution in this area comes out of French Canada, where Scarfone (2006, 2014a) has argued that psychoanalysis is not an attention to the past but rather to the “ unpast ” of the individual, an “ actua l” time where what occurs are “ presentations instead of re-presentations, acts ( Agieren ) instead of thoughts ” (Scarfone, 2006, p 827; original emphasis). III. E. Latin American Developments and Related Conceptualizations A strong Kleinian tradition of Latin American psychoanalysis, facilitated by close contacts with the British Kleinian group from the early 1940s, in conjunction with early access to Spanish translations of Freud’s oeuvre in the 1920s (López-Ballesteros, 1923), led to such original synthetic conceptualizations of the unconscious, as Unconscious Logic and Unconscious Communication, influence of which has been felt across all three psychoanalytic cultures. III. Ea. Unconscious Logic The comprehension of the logic of the unconscious is a fundamental tool to the psychoanalyst at every moment. It belongs to the essence of psychoanalysis. This tool is indeed indispensable to understand any psychotic expression of any patient. The first author to study Unconscious Logic was Freud (1900) in The Interpretation of Dreams, where he describes what he called “Primary Process”, the logic of the unconscious, characterized by: 1) absence of mutual contradiction among the presentations of the various instincts; 2) displacement; 3) condensation; 4) atemporality, and 5) substitution of psychic for external reality. Freud pursued this topic in several other texts: Two Principles of Mental Functioning (1911c); A Case of Paranoia (1911a); The Unconscious (1915c); The Ego and the Id (1923a); and New Introductory Lectures (1933). Writing on his view of merits of Freud’s fundamental discovery in “The Unconscious as Infinite Sets”, Matte-Blanco (1975) noted that it was not the discovery of the unconscious per se, but the discovery of a world ruled by entirely different laws from those governing conscious thinking. In Matte-Blanco’s view, Freud’s genius was the discovery of these precise laws, which goverened this strange “Realm of the Illogical” (Freud 1940a, p. 168). In reviewing Matte-Blanco’s work, Henry Rey (1976, p.491) observed: “Matte-Blanco is also extremely concerned and that would seem to be his first preoccupation, with the development that the notion of the unconscious has taken in Freud’s writings and amongst psychoanalysts. From being ‘the Unconscious’, that is to say a living aspect of the personality with activities governed by certain laws, it became demoted to merely the quality of being unconscious”. Combining Freud´s conceptions with mathematical propositions, Matte-Blanco developed the concept of Unconscious Logic (bi-logic) which is ruled by two principles: 1) The principle of generalization, which explains that, unlike the logic of the conscious system,

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