Bateson and Matte-Blanco: Bio-Logic and Bi-LogicR Horacio Etchegoyen; Posadas 1580, 13* A, 1112 Buenos, Aires, Argentina,

BUENOS AIRES Jorge L Ahumada; Posadas 1580, 13* A, 1112 Buenos, Aires, Argentina, BUENOS AIRES Man thinks in two kinds of terms: one, the natural terms, shared with beasts; the other, the conventional terms (the logicals) enjoyed by man alone. William of Ockham (12801349). The growing recognition achieved by Matte-Blanco's seminal work on the logic of the unconscious makes it necessary to place it in relation to other currents of thought. We'll consider here some links between Matte-Blanco's bi-logic and what may be called 'biologic', the study of relationship and communication in the evolution of living forms in the work of Gregory Bateson. Assuming that joint use of Matte-Blanco's and Bateson's ideas can lead to an updating of psychoanalytic theory that will be true to present-day science, to clinical practice, and to Freud's meanings, Arden (1984) was first to approach their clinical complementarity, centring on the notion of double bind and on their reliance on Russell's theory of logical types. She points to a crucial Batesonian idea, saying that 'the signals exchanged between people convey messages of a higher logical type than the contents of those messages' (p. 443) but, as her paper is a clinical one, she does not pursue this subject. A deeper grasp of Bateson's work seems necessary to understand their conceptual complementarities. Matte-Blanco's is a logical approach to the analytic session, while Bateson, an anthropologist, naturalist and epistemologist who was an associate of McCulloch, Wiener and Von Neumann in the dawn of the cybernetic revolution, has explored the evolutionary development of 'patterning' or 'mind' across fields as diverse as mammalian and schizophrenic communication, and primitive art; he thus offers a bio-logical counterpart to Matte-Blanco's bilogical explorations of clinical data. That from his standpoint Bateson shares the general idea of a bi-logic is succinctly shown by his citation of Ockham (1979, p. 91) which we have quoted at the start of this paper. We'll try to show how Bateson's understanding of relationship and comunication in mammals adds bio-logical support to Matte-Blanco's fundamental postulation of a bi-logic, with joint operation of bivalent or asymmetrical logic, and of a symmetrical logic whereby the unconscious operates in terms of infinite sets. We hope the reader can understand the futility of attempting a self-contained paper summarizing the ideas of both these original and profound thinkers, and we refer him to Rayner's (1981) review, to Arden's (1984) paper, and to the recent 'Introduction' by Rayner & Tuckett (1988) to Matte-Blanco's Thinking, Feeling and Being. No suitable review is available on Bateson so we'll summarize someonly someof his ideas, which he considers simple but not easy to grasp, as they run counter to our whole education, which has taught us that the way to define something is by what it supposedly is in itself, not by its relations to other things (1979, p. 17). This requirement of a substantial shift in perspective may be the reason why Bateson's thought, in spite of its relevance, has mostly been lost to psychoanalysis. 'Relationship' is Bateson's conceptual tool. Each and every step of biological evolution comes into being within and through relationship, and so 'the relationship comes first: it precedes' (1979, p. 143). The relationship is always the result of double description: the two parties to the interaction can be seen as two eyes, each giving a monocular vision of what goes on, and, together, giving a binocular vision in depth, this double view being the relationship. (As we can see, Bateson's wording is in terms of the 'external' relationship, not the 'internal' one. Not being a psychoanalyst he does not have a psychoanalyst's concept of a fully dynamic unconscious; but, as what is mental is to him primarily unconscious and the events in the relationship lead to 'introjection', his viewpoint can be considered, in a wide sense, 'object relational'.) Before entering into our review of Bateson's views on communication, some comments on the nature of instinct and on the relationship of logic to facts seem to be in order. ON THE CATEGORIES OF LOGIC AND THE CATEGORIES OF INSTINCT In 'Infinite sets and double binds' (1984) Arden points out that Matte-Blanco's bi-logic 'corresponds very closely to Freud's concept of the primary and secondary processes', adding that her account of logical typing

applies to the secondary process and Matte-Blanco's asymmetrical thinking, so called because secondary process thinking makes use of logical categories for the recognition and discrimination of differences. Knowledge of the external world is ordered into categories of space, time and more complex relationships by processes of differentiation into classes or sets. Symmetrical thinking on the other hand is equivalent to primary process thinking, whereas we know logical categories do not apply. Matte-Blanco bases his concept of symmetrical thinking on a part of Russell's theory that deals with an exception to the rule that a class cannot be represented by one of its members. This exception states that when the sets are infinite the subset is equal to the whole set (1984, p. 444, our italics). That is, that when the set is infinite the 'part' equals the 'whole'. But, while logical categories do not apply to Freud's definition of primary process and to MatteBlanco's symmetrical logic, some kind of recognition and discrimination of differences, to use Arden's terms, certainly applies to unconscious phantasy and to instinct. More than thirty years ago MoneyKyrle stated that the plastic instincts of higher animals are to be described in terms of a 'pyramid of conditional statements' (1955, p. 286), that is, in terms of a 'logic of instinct'. In Money-Kyrle's view, Freud and his followers described how a number of innate phantasy patterns are likely to develop under the influence of different experiences; the psychoanalytic study of these phantasy patterns is the study of instinct in man (p. 287). It may well be that instinct operates in lower vertebrates exclusively in terms of recognition and discrimination of classes. (Lorenz's study (1963) of coral fish, which take account only of 'territorial context' and of broad 'classes' such as 'predator', 'rival' or 'female', is a case in point.) Only much later, in mammalian evolution, the 'pyramid of conditional statements' of instinct (to use MoneyKyrle's terms) comes to operateand then only to a limited extentin terms of differences between individuals. Recognition of 'self', seemingly so fundamental, is exceedingly new: while the chimpanzee has come to recognize fully all individuals in his natural community and can precisely assume their individual behaviours in given contexts, only the trained chimpanzee (but not those in the natural state) can recognize his 'self' in a mirror, thus acknowledging difference between 'self' and 'other'. Bio-logically, recognition of 'class' appears to be prior to recognition of the individuality of its 'members'. ON THE PLACE OF LOGIC AND THE PLACE OF FACTS Neither Matte-Blanco nor Bateson is a logician, but their work deals with 'logic': Matte-Blanco's in a more strict sense, Bateson's in a wider one. What is, then, the relation of logic to facts? Following Hume, Ayer (1946) divides all genuine propositions into two classes: those which concern 'relations of ideas' and those which concern 'matters of fact'. The former concern the a priori propositions of logic and pure mathematics, which are necessary and certain only because they are analytic: they do not make any assertion about the empirical world and so they cannot be confuted in experience. Propositions concerning empirical matters of fact, on the other hand, are to Ayer hypotheses, which can be probable but never certain. This tautological character of formal logic was obscured in traditional logic which, by speaking of judgements instead of propositions, gave the impression of being concerned in a specially intimate way with the workings of thought; what it was actually concerned with was the formal relationship of classes, not with the properties of men's minds, much less with the properties of material objects. And Ayer adds that there are many possible logics or tautologies, any of which can serve as a principle of inference. This modern conception, derived from Whitehead & Russell's Principia Mathematica, is to be sharply contrasted to the traditional conception of logic coming from Aristotle's 'laws of thought', whereas 'the logician seeks to establish the norm of standards of sound thinking logic establishes how people ought to think' (Schipper & Schuh, 1960, p. 5). Much in the same vein as Ayer, in 'The logical categories of learning and communication' Bateson (1968a) argues that there are important differences between the world of logic and the world of phenomena. The Theory of Logical Types, he says, deals only with rigorously digital communication, and it is doubtful how far it may be applied to analogue or iconic systems; there is in fact almost no formal theory dealing with analogic communication. He makes the further important point (known, in

a way, to psychoanalysis since Freud's Traumdeutung) that in purely analogic or iconic communication no paradox can be generated because there is no signal for 'no'. It has been Matte-Blanco's valiant effort to introduce, characterizing the operation of the deep unconscious, a symmetrical logic: the unconscious, he says, treats the converse of any relation as identical to it, and so at this level there is no distinction between part and whole, or between self and object, or between opposites. In this way, he can account for Freud's characteristics of the unconscious: timelessness, replacement of external by internal reality, condensation, displacement, and absence of mutual contradiction. Formal bivalent logic, which Matte-Blanco calls 'asymmetrical logic', and his 'symmetrical logic' are mutually anaclitic: the functioning of each one is dependent upon the existence of the other. Together they constitute a bi-logic, each term of which is antinomic to the other: where the asymmetric or heterogenic mode of being perceives an asymmetrical relation (i.e. 'John is the father of Peter'), to the symmetrical or indivisible mode Peter is, at the same time, the father of John. ANALOGIC COMMUNICATION, LANGUAGE AND CONTEXT We can introduce our overview of Bateson's contribution to the 'patterning' of relationship or mind by considering why gestures and tones of voice are, across cultural barriers, partly intelligible, while foreign languages are unintelligible: verbal language is almost (but not quite) purely digital while gestures and tones of voice are analogic. We come here to an essential distinction: in digital communication a name usually has only a purely conventional arbitrary connection with the class named. The numeral 5 is only the name of a magnitude a purely digital computer is not fed with magnitudes, but only with names of positions in a matrix (1966, pp. 3423). Digital systems containing 'names' closely resemble systems containing 'number': there is a discontinuity between each 'name' and the next. Systems containing names are discrete, while, contrarily, the analogic systems characterizing 'relationship' (and emotion) are continuous: in analogic communication, real magnitudes are used the magnitude of the gesture, the loudness of the voice, the length of the pause, the tension of the muscle and so forth correspond (directly or inversely) to magnitudes in the relationship that is the subject of discourse (1966, pp. 3423). This distinction between an analogic communication using real magnitudes, and a digital communication dealing with names is seen by Bateson as central to an understanding of the epistemology of relationship: We are so befuddled by language that we cannot think straight, and it is convenient, sometimes, to remember that we are really mammals. The epistemology of the 'heart' is that of any non-human mammal. The cat does not say 'milk'; she simply acts out (or is) her end of an interchange, the pattern of which we in language would call 'dependency' To act or be one end of a pattern of interaction is to propose the other end. A context is set for a certain kind of response (1969, p. 246). When a mammal finds himself in the wrong regarding its rules for making sense of an important relationship, severe pain and maladjustment is the result. The relationship is a weaving of messages that both propose context and have meaning only by virtue of context (1969, p. 246). Contrary to the belief that language replaces cruder communicational systems, he argues that our iconic communication serves functions totally different from those of language and, indeed, performs functions which verbal language is unsuited to perform the discourse of non-verbal communication is precisely concerned with matters of relationship love, hate, respect, fear, dependency falsification of this discourse rapidly becomes pathogenic (1968b, pp. 3878, our italics).

Such falsification, to Bateson unavoidable whenever iconic affective codes are translated into words, is part and parcel of science, whose conceptual systems attempt 'a simulacrum of the real world in words' (1968b, p. 389). For our purposes, perhaps the most crucialand maybe the most difficult to graspof Bateson's notions is that an important relationship is the most general 'context of context of context' , and it is 'within' this 'context of context of context' that 'contexts' and 'contexts of contexts' are set. He illustrates what he means by the relationship as 'context of context of context' by what happened in the relationship between porpoise and trainer when the trainer repeatedly altered the rules for reward: not only the rules by which the porpoise can make sense of each 'event' or 'context', but also of 'classes of events' ('context of context'). Finally the porpoise learns to deal with the 'context of context', by offering a new piece of behaviour whenever she came on stage. What is more, after a point of insight in which she appeared much excitedan insight involving a 'jump' of logical type from information about an event to information about a class of eventsshe put up eight consecutive pieces of new behaviour, of which four had never been observed in the species. Maladjustment got to be so severe that many unwarranted rewards were necessary to sustain the relationship through the ordeal. But, as we see, not only pain and maladjustment can result; if tolerated, the process can enhance creativity (1969, pp. 2469; 1979, p. 130). The distinction between 'events' ('context') and 'classes of events' ('context of context') comes out sharply in Bateson's critique of Pavlovian psychology which he considers based upon a confusion of these levels. The classic Pavlovian experimental neurosis results when a dog fails to be able to discriminate between a circle and an ellipse: to Bateson what matters is not the 'event' ('context') of failure to distinguish between the geometrical figures, but the 'class of events' ('context of context') of being unable to guess. What the Pavlovian scientist uses 'relationship' to the dog as 'context of context of context' for, is to set as 'context of context' the instruction that the dog should avoid its usual way of solving situations by trial and error (guessing). So when the 'event' (requirement of a distinction of figures) clashes with the 'class of events' or 'context of context' ('not guessing') a sharp disruption of behaviour, and of relationship to the experimenter as 'context of context of context', is the result. THE DEDUCTIVE STEP Analogic communication involves patterns of action thatnot surprisingly to psychoanalystsrepeat in many instances the patterns of relations of early infancy. When a cat tries to get us to give her food she'll make with us the movements and sounds a kitten makes with a mother cat, 'talking' in terms of patterns and contingencies of relationship. It is up to us to make a deductive step and guess that it is milk that the cat wants. This deductive step is to Bateson (1966, p. 337) the great new thing in the evolution of human language: the discovery of how to be specific about something other than relationship, that is, the discovery of an ostensive languageemploying 'names'about an external world. A predominantly digital language employing 'names' is a real newcomer. In spite of his capacities for abstract thought, the vocalization of the chimpanzee is wholly dependent on emotion. In her monumental study, The Chimpanzees of Gombe, Jane Goodall comments: Most of their calls serve a distinct communicative function in that they may alter, often in a highly predictable way, the behavior of individuals who hear them Chimpanzee communications are closely bound to emotion. The production of a sound in the absence of the appropriate emotional state seems to be an almost impossible task for a chimpanzee (1986, p. 125). Coherently with this almost complete dependence on emotional state of the mainly analogic vocal signals about relationship of our closest relative, Bateson comments that (digital) words function poorly in the actual discussion of man's emotionally important relationships, and that in them we pay more attention to gestures and vocal intonation than to the words themselves (1966, p. 344). PART-AND-WHOLE IN ANALOGIC COMMUNICATION We come now upon a central link between Matte-Blanco's postulation of a symmetrical logic and Bateson's understanding of analogic and iconic communication. As was said before, in symmetrical

logic the 'part' equals the 'whole', and part-for-whole messages are, according to Bateson, the basic style of coding of 'relationship' in animal communication. In animal communication the action is the message, and from 'parts' of actions messages will gradually evolve which become more differentiated from the 'whole' actions of which they are a 'part'. The bared fang, which is 'part' of a whole pattern, the dog's attack, may evolve into a 'signal' conditional to its 'whole', of an attack to be made unless certain conditions are met. When the part is completely split from its referent, and the bared fang only mentions an attack which, if and when made, will involve a new baring of the fangs, the 'part' has become a true iconic signal. The iconic signal may then evolve towards digitalization (and then magnitudes in it will no longer refer to magnitudes within the whole which is its referent), or may take on ritual or metaphoric meanings in contexts where the original referent is no longer relevant (Bateson, 1968b, p. 393): the leader of the wolf pack asserts his relationship to a wolf caught in a sexual transgression by mouthing its neck in the ways parent wolves do to puppies on weaning (1966, p. 336). Animal part-for-whole communication refers to the universe animal plus other animals rather than to the universe animal plus external environment, but even in this last case, communication is on the same part-for-whole basis: insofar as animals can signal at all about the external universe, they do so by means of actions which are parts of their response to that universe. The jackdaws indicate to each other that Lorenz is a 'jackdaweater' not by simulating some part of the act of eating jackdaws but by simulating part of their aggression vis--vis such a creature (1968b, pp. 3934, our italics). Another important feature of animal part-for-whole communication is that the subject of any predicate in this iconic discourse is the emitter of the signal, who is always ostensively present at least two steps are necessary to get from the iconic use of parts of patterns to the naming of entities in the external environment: there was both a change in coding and a change in the centring of the subject-predicate frame (p. 399). That is, (a) a change in coding from an analogiciconic relational discourse employing real actions on a part-for-whole basis to a predominantly digital discourse employing 'names', and (b) a change in centring of the subject-predicate frame from one in which the subject is the emitter of the signal to one in which the emitter of the signal becomes third-party to subject and predicate. PSYCHOLOGICAL FRAMES AND LOGICAL LEVELS So the seemingly simple denotative level ('The cat is on the mat') is the result of an exceedingly long evolutionary process. Bateson (1955a) points, beyond it, to two ranges of more abstract (and generally implicit) levels of communication: (a) the metalinguistic, where the subject of the discourse is the language, (b) the metacommunicative, where the subject of the discourse is the relationship of the speakers. An important step in this protracted evolution of communication takes place when the individual comes to recognize that mood-signs, another's and his own, are only signals, which can be trusted, distrusted, falsified, denied, amplified, corrected and so forth this realization that signals are signals is by no means complete even among the human species (p. 151). The problems around 'logical types' arise even in mainly analogic animal interaction, and they are evolutionarily much earlier than the development of a verbal language employing 'names'; they can be seen as essential steps towards the development of 'map-territory' relations: 'play' can be used to illustrate this. Being similar to combat, monkeys' play requires metacommunication of the message 'This is play'. The playful nip, says Bateson, denotes the bite, but not what would be denoted by the bite: this is inadmissible to the Theory of Logical Types, because the word 'denote' is used in two degrees of abstraction, which are treated as synonymous. But, he says, it would be bad natural history to expect the mental processes and communication habits of mammals to conform to the logician's ideal. Language bears to the objects which it denotes a relationship comparable to that which a map bears to a territory (p. 153). The actions of 'play' denote other actions of 'not play', and so 'play' may have been an important stepwith threat, histrionics, deceit and ritualtowards the discovery of mapterritory relations (p. 158).

Bateson approaches psychological frames by what he considers an overly concrete analogy, the picture frame, and an overly abstract one, the mathematical set: a psychological set is (or delimits) a class or a set of messages (or meaningful actions). An important type of psychological frame attempts to delimit a logical type: the picture frame is an instruction to the viewer that he should not extend the premises that obtain between the figures within the picture to the wallpaper behind it. But it is precisely this sort of frame that precipitates paradox. The rule for avoiding paradox states that the items outside any enclosing line be of the same logical type as those within The message 'This is play' sets a frame of the sort which is likely to generate paradox: it is an attempt to discriminate between, or draw a line between, categories of different logical types (1955a, p. 162) Trouble with the signals of the same logical type as 'This is play', i.e. troubles in identifying and interpreting the more abstract (and quite unconscious) context markers telling what sort of a message a message is, shows up, according to Bateson (1955b, p. 167), as 'ego-weakness' in the schizophrenic who, upon the waitress' 'What can I do for you?', doubts whether she plans to do him in, or wants to go to bed with him, or is just offering him a cup of coffee. SOME NOTES ON 'DOUBLE DESCRIPTION' We said before that to Bateson the relationship is the result of 'double description', each party to the interaction having only a monocular vision of what goes on, while, together, they give a binocular vision in depth, this binocular vision being the relationship. But there is more to this model of 'binocular vision' or, in more general terms, of 'double description' or double (or multiple) comparison. Bateson (1979, pp. 73ff) holds that the difference between the information provided by one retina and that provided by the other is itself information of a different logical type, this being a particular case of a general finding of information processing: that the genesis of information of a new logical type comes out of the juxtaposition of multiple descriptions. Extra depth is to be expected whenever the information for the two descriptions is differently collected, or differently coded. Insight is achieved by comparing the different instances with one another, and multiple sources of information (often in contrasting modes or languages) are enormously better than one. This process of 'double description' leading to learning of 'context of context' is so general that the dynamics of relationship can be seen as a special case of 'double description'. We can now summarize our overview of Bateson's work saying that it shows, very schematically, two codes of communication and two different basic 'logics': (a) analogic codes of relationship, which include mood-signs, iconic signals in which action messages operate on a part-for-whole basis, 'psychological frames' delimiting 'context', and highly abstract 'contexts of contexts'; (b) as a very recent acquisition, the predominantly digital codes of verbal languages, in which it becomes possible for the emitter of the signal to be third party to the subject of the proposition, and dealing not with continuous 'actions' but with discrete 'names'. These two codes, and their 'logics', correspond roughly to Matte-Blanco's 'two modes of being', the homogeneous indivisible mode and the heterogeneous dividing mode, but it seems to us that their 'natural history' helps definein the manner of a 'double description'some questions more precisely than a purely logical approach. Specifically, bio-logic helps draw the relational dimensions of Matte-Blanco's homogeneous indivisible mode. THE UNCONSCIOUS AND CONSCIOUS IN MATTE-BLANCO'S WORK In The Unconscious as Infinite Sets Matte-Blanco (1975, pp. 72ff) painstakingly works out in Freud's later work a wide concept of an unrepressed unconscious whose 'primitive and irrational characteristics' (Freud, 1933, p. 75) mark the operation of the id, and having the attributes adjoined earlier to the primary process and the system unconscious. He emphasizes that this 'Realm of the unconscious' was to Freud the true psychical reality. The quality of being unconscious is to Matte-Blanco 'a consequence of the nature of consciousness, which cannot contain within itself the symmetrical being' (1975, p. 97). Consciousness cannot focus

on more than one thing at a time and must separate one thing from the next, while the symmetrical mode identifies the individual to the class. A whole class cannot enter consciousness, which can only consider a class in two ways: either focusing on its limits, on what characterizes it and distinguishes it from all other classes, or, alternatively, focusing on the individuals that compose it. That is why in the case of emotion what appears in consciousness are not the classes, but emotions directed towards individuals. The conscious description is an external, asymmetrical way of graspingin terms of discrete entitiesa reality which has no discrete entities or parts, and which, as such, cannot enter consciousness unless it is translated into discrete entities, i.e. entities separated from one another (1975, p. 278). That the unconscious deals with only classes or sets rather than specific concrete individuals may sound strange to many ears, but ethological evidence seems to support the idea that instinct functions primarily in terms of classes. Bateson's finding that emotional-relational codes are primarily continuous while those employing 'names' (and obviously much closer to consciousness) are discrete, offers in our view important independent support to the distinction of an indivisible (continuous) and an heterogenic (discrete) mode. Recognition of individuals (including the speaker) as such, that is, as distinct from the class, requires quite an advanced degree of digitalization. CHANGE AS STOCHASTIC PROCESS We'll try to show now that Bateson's work allows the ascription of an essential biological function to the most resisted of Matte-Blanco's proposals, the 'indivisible mode' and its outcome in the domain of logic, the principle of symmetry. To pursue our argument we must turn first to Bateson's idea of what an explanation is: the mapping on to tautology of an unfamiliar sequence of events. 1 After Von Neumann, he states that tautology offers connexions between propositions but no new information whatsoever, while explanation contains only the (new) information that was present in the description (this last, description, contains information but no logic and no explanation). This relation between tautology and the (new) information to be processed is to Bateson extremely general, applying to the processes of genesis of 'mind' along the whole biological evolution: form is an analogue of tautology (and also of 'naming') while process is an analogue of the aggregate of phenomena to be explained (1979, pp. 200206). In other language there is, along biological evolution within 'relationship', an interlocking alternation of digital ('naming') and analogic ('process') steps: every action of the living creature involves some trial and error, and for any trial to be new it must be in some degree random (p. 250). So processes of change (that is, processes involving newness) are always stochastic, that is, they involve a random component together with some selective process (a tautology) so that only certain outcomes are allowed to endure. BIO-LOGIC AND MATTE-BLANCO'S 'TWO WAYS OF BEING' It may by now be clear to the reader that the evolutionary development of 'mind', as Bateson conceives it, and Matte-Blanco's basic postulate of 'two modes of being', an heterogenic dividing mode and an undivided mode, express the same general structure: a tautology involving 'names' (a 'logic'), on one side, and a 'process', that is, an aggregate of 'new' data to be understood or explained by mapping on to tautology. It is just at the point criticized by Skelton (1984) that we find Matte-Blanco's spark of genius. What Skelton states from the logician's standpoint is that Matte-Blanco's bi-logic is, as a system, inconsistent, and that 'if the basic principles of a system contradict each other then it can be proved that anything whatsoever can be proved in that system' (p. 455). In his reply to Skelton, Matte-Blanco (1984) avows that 'the requirement of non-contradiction applies to a formal system ruled only by bivalent logic and does not necessarily apply in a bi-logical system. It is strange but it is so' (p. 459), and he challenges Skelton to express in terms of bivalent logic the characteristics of the unconscious as expounded by Freud. Not being logicians we are in no position to discuss Skelton's objections on the purely logical grounds he posits. But from our standpoint, what he objects to is Matte-Blanco's feat: turning the system of formal logic into an instrument, an inductive system (Langer, 1953), a comprehensive tautology that is able to map on to it the findings of analytic practice. He himself has avowed that logic is but an instrument (1988, p. 94): as bivalent logic did not offer a suitable tautology, he offers a suitable one. And there is nothing strange if an instrument is not totally consistent: no instrument ever is.

That, as stated by Matte-Blanco (1984, p. 459), the symmetrical or indivisible mode is to be placed at the limit of the larger and larger classes resulting from symmetrization, allows further insight into the nature of his instrument. What he does is to set up, much beyond the boundaries set by that other tautology, bivalent logic, another limit, bounded by the principle of symmetry. In this way he opens up a conceptual field allowing for the mapping of the 'new', the 'information', the 'random', the clinical happenings of the analytic session. This in turn makes possible an evolution of the 'tautologies' and then new theory can evolve. A bilogic involving on one side the highly evolved tautologies of logic and mathematics and on the other side an opening into the 'random' would seem to be in agreement not only with a need for expressing the characteristics of the unconscious as expounded by Freud, but also with the general 'patterning' of bio-logical evolution, as expressed by Bateson. From this standpoint it can be said that the indivisible mode is mind's bio-logical opening on to the 'new' . If the coincidences between Bateson and Matte-Blanco are striking indeed, what can be said of their discrepancies? They derive in our view from the perspectives they operate from, rather than from properly conceptual divergences. In Bateson's evolutionary perspective action plays a greater role, and so his approach is more 'action' and 'relationship'-based, while Matte-Blanco may appear more logic-based. But on the whole they seem to draw, from their widely different standpoints, strongly complementary maps: an invaluable 'double description' that, by the way, shows that psychoanalysis is not divorced from science as so many seem to fearor indeed hope. What Bateson's natural history shows quite conclusively is that a 'logic' of relationship that includes conflicts of, and developments about, logical types is much earlier than human 'logic'. He thus provides strong biological support to something analysts have adumbrated for a long time: that there is in every human being a coexistence of different and conflicting unconscious relational 'logics'. So between the boundaries set by bivalent logic and symmetrical logic we can properly speak of an 'oral logic' or a 'phallic logic', each with its own unconscious analogic codes. Thinking about instinct as both relational and stochastic (that is, having a random component) elegantly solves a difficulty met by Matte-Blanco (1975) in Freud's diagrams of the tripartite mind of the structural theory, where the instincts would come into contact with the mind at the deeper portions of the id. If the deeper portions of the id are the parts with the greatest proportions of symmetry, this could not be the case. For the biological concept of instinct is a highly asymmetrical one. An instinct searches for definite aims and definite objects, whereas in the most symmetrical aspects of the id, the generalising tendency and the tendency to substitute one thing for another is at its highest degree (p. 131). The random component of instinct, allowing for the 'new' and for variability, necessarily has 'the greatest proportion of symmetry'. That instincts have variabilitythat is, a random componentwas already known to Darwin who, in the On the Origin of Species(1859), assumed instinctual variability played a not unimportant role in evolution. We want to emphasize that we have dealt with our subject, the relation between Bateson's and Matte-Blanco's work, only in the most general terms, and many important topics remain open to further work. Our outlook seems to be in quite precise agreement with Matte-Blanco's (n/d) own concepts about the analyst's operation in the session, namely, with his definition of interpretation as 'a mapping of some set that we have called a given mental reality (R), in a set of propositions, that we'll call I' (p. 3). In our view this 'given mental reality' (of which the 'symmetric way of being' is the limit) is also propositional, though not in a logical but in a bio-logical way: bio-logical 'action' propositions posited as relational analogic 'frames'. We have now only to thank Matte-Blanco for his painstaking efforts to advance psychoanalytic theory. We are confident that the understanding of the diverse 'logics' of the different levels and 'splits' of mind has much to gain from an increasingly refined logical approach as a result of his pioneering work. Footnotes
1

'explanation is necessarily a mapping of the derivatives of the phenomena to be described on to some surface or matrix or system of coordinates Every receiving system, even a matrix or system

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SUMMARY Matte-Blanco's fundamental postulation of a bi-logic, with joint operation of (a) bivalent, Aristotelian or asymmetrical logic, and (b) symmetrical logic, with no distinction between part and whole, between opposites, or between self and other, is compared in this paper to Bateson's evolutionary understanding of 'mind'. Bateson's studies of analogic and iconic mammalian communication, where 'relationship' is the 'context of context of context', add up to an emotional-relational bio-logic operating as 'action' on a part-for-whole basis. His distinction of analogic (emotional) codes dealing with continuous magnitudes, and digital codes dealing with discrete 'names', closely parallels Matte-Blanco's distinction of antinomic 'heterogenic' and 'indivisible' modes. The understanding of the diverse 'logics' of the different levels and 'splits' of mind has much to gain from Matte-Blanco's pioneering logical approach.

This publication is protected by US and international copyright lawsand its content may not be copied without the copyright holder's express written permission except for the print or download capabilities of the retrieval software used for access. This content is intended solely for the use of the individual user. International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 1990; v.17, p493 (10pp.)