Is There Any Logic in Feelings? An Introduction to Matte Blanco's Theory of Emotions

Abstract

Most people do not know much about Matte Blanco's bi-logic, so I will first present something about his fundamental conceptions and afterwards work towards a finale about feelings. These basic conceptions turn out to be extremely simple but they are so general, so abstract, that they are maddening to grasp. With this warning, off we go.Freud's greatest contribution was, perhaps, to show that certain fundamental forms of transformation, representation or symbolization were taking place in the mind: a conscious idea or act could stand for some other experience but the link between the two was often not apparent. Unconscious processes were inferred as taking place. Freud showed that these unconscious processes do not obey the ordinary rules of logic. In fact he spelt out especially five characteristics of the unconscious which highlighted the differences from conscious level thought. These were displacement, condensation, timelessness, absence of mutual contradiction and replacement of external by internal reality.

In the forests of the night: Psychodynamic treatment of schizophrenia through the lens of Matte-Blanco’s bi-logic.

“…On a more symbolic level, to say "I am a failure" after striking out in the bottom of the ninth is a whole/part misidentification of the experience of "I failed this time." But in the realm of the unrepressed unconscious this becomes a defining feature of perception, where whole objects are experienced as identical to their parts (Rayner, 1995a).…”

“…” To a certain extent, this is a symmetrization that most of us utilize regularly, when we generalize a partial feature or characteristic to the whole; to refer to someone as an intimate anatomical part is a common example. On a more symbolic level, to say “I am a failure” after striking out in the bottom of the ninth is a whole/part misidentification of the experience of “I failed this time.” But in the realm of the unrepressed unconscious this becomes a defining feature of perception, where whole objects are experienced as identical to their parts (Rayner, 1995a).…”

“…Ignacio Matte-Blanco achieved his highest degree of popularity in Chile and Italy, and certainly has a small set of devotees in the U.K. and United States. His published works, The Unconscious as Infinite Sets (1975) and Thinking, Feeling, and Believing (1988) are mammoth (Rayner, 1995b) and demand a rather sizable intellectual and temporal investment on the part of the reader. The rewards, however, for those who expose themselves to the theory of bi-logic are rich theoretically and clinically.…”

A Quantum-Classical Model of Brain Dynamics

“…However, the study of the human psyche and its applications in clinical psychology [36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48] seem to strongly support a quantum-classical modelization of brain dynamics going beyond the one adopted in Refs. .…”

Systematic Review of Socio-Emotional Values Within Organizations

“…The quest to overcome the past division between emotions and rationality began with the ancient Greek dualism of “ pathos ” and “ logos ” and continued throughout the subsequent centuries. This contraposition was eliminated by the psychoanalytic approach ( Freud, 1911 ; Rayner, 1995 ; Blanco, 2019 ), whereby the human mind is shown to work without following a rational line, using cognitive sciences ( Beck, 1967 ; Arnold, 1984 ), in which emotion, rational processes, and cognitive functions are melted down to give us the opportunity to evaluate and manage our daily lives using the emotive intelligence paradigm ( Goleman, 1996 ), which states that even people with the highest scores on the traditional intelligence quotient (IQ) test can perform worse than people with lower IQs but higher emotional intelligence. Emotions are important during strategic phases of organizational life, such as succession ( Manzoor et al, 2018 ), especially in a family firm ( Razzak et al, 2019 ).…”