ABSTRACT

Freud’s greatest contribution was probably to show the importance of unconscious processes in mental life and how they could, sometimes at least, be understood. Matte Blanco’s fundamental contribution stems from this. Freud achieved, for the first time, the definition of an array of particular characteristics of the unconscious, but they remained a rather disparate collection. Matte Blanco saw that Freud’s apparently uncoordinated array could well be understood in terms of the interaction of a very few precisely defined fundamental processes which, however, can often produce highly complex dynamic mental structures. These he calls bi-logical structures.