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the logic of the unconscious does not consider individuals as units, but as members of ever- larger groups (classes, sets). Displacement occurs according to this principle; 2) The principle of symmetry, which requires the unconscious to always treat the obverse/converse of every relationship in the same way, as if it were always identical to it. Timelessness is a consequence of this second principle. Both principles operate with condensation and the lack of contradiction. He emphasized that this ‘Realm of the unconscious’ was to Freud the true psychical reality. In this realm, the mind works through a bi-logic, this is, by the simultaneous functioning of the principle of asymmetry in terms of individuals and their differences, which characterizes everyday logic and scientific thinking functions and both consciousness and Freud’s secondary process, and the principle of symmetry, governing Freud’s primary process. For Matte-Blanco, displacement is at the base of projection, sublimation, transference, the return of the repressed and the division of objects. When an individual displaces, he treats the original primitive object and the object towards which he displaces, as elements of a class with a specific attribute, which might be not apparent to his conscious thinking but is so to his Unconscious. Thus, if someone experiences his boss as a dangerous father, in terms of symbolic logic we may say that his Unconscious treats his boss and father as elements of one and the same class: unconsciously they are identical. Any structure or any system is a set; a class is a set of all the individuals who possess the attributes or qualities defining the class. Whenever a set is infinite in the sense that the counting of its element cannot come to an end, then the part becomes equivalent to the whole: this is what happens in symmetrical logic and in the operation of the Unconscious. Matte-Blanco’s bi-logical structures stratify the entire range of psychic life into layers that are differentiated by the greater or lesser presence of asymmetrical-divisible and symmetrical-indivisible modes of thought processes. This conceptualization includes Freud’s later works on an unrepressed unconscious whose ‘primitive and irrational characteristics’ (1933, p.75) mark the operation of the Id (1923a, 1926) and have the same attributes earlier ascribed to the primary process and the unconscious-as-system. Drawing on the evolution of Freud’s thought on the Unconscious, Matte-Blanco proceeded to reformulate – through the lens of mathematical logic – the laws of the Unconscious and contrast them with the laws of Aristotelian scientific logic embedded in conscious mentation (secondary process). At its extreme, the symmetric logic of the deepest stratum of the structural unrepressed Unconscious constitutes an indivisible symmetric mode of being, characterized by timelessness and spacelessness. In doing so, he elaborated on the problem of psychological space and multidimensionality, in the context of the notion of object and the internal world, past, present and future. Matte-Blanco viewed the psychic facts of timelessness and spacelessness as the expression of Unconscious Logic making the whole equal to any of its parts and vice versa. In the same vein, in his re-analysis of Freud’s Case of Paranoia (1911a), he articulated Freud’s contrasts between inside and outside and psychic versus physical reality in terms of his concepts of bi-logic and infinitization (Matte-Blanco 1988).
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