Unconscious Logic

While the theories of Matte Blanco about the structure of the unconscious and the way in which it operates are generally recognised to be the most original since those of Freud, for many people the ways in which his ideas are expressed, including the use of terminology from mathematics and logic, make them difficult of access. Eric Rayner has written the first clear introduction to Matte Blanco's key concepts for psychotherapists and psychoanalysts and all those concerned with moving psychoanalytic thinking forward. He sets out the central ideas in a way which is easy to understand and then shows, with examples, how they relate to clinical practice. He also describes how the ideas are related to those of people in other disciplines - mathematics, logic, psychology (specifically Piaget), and anthropology, among others. Drawing on the work of a group of people who have been inspired by Matte Blanco's thinking to extend their own ideas and test them out in the consulting room, this book reveals the significance of Matte Blanco's thought for future research.

The Unconscious as Space explores the experience of being and the practice of psychoanalysis by thinking of the unconscious in mathematical terms. Anca Carrington introduces mathematical models of space, from dimension theory to algebraic topology and knot theory, and considers their immediate psychoanalytic relevance. The hypothesis that the unconscious is structured like a space marked by impossibility is then examined. Carrington considers the clinical implications, with particular focus on the interplay between language and the unconscious as related topological spaces in which movement takes place along knot-like pathways. The Unconscious as Space will be of appeal to psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and mental health professionals in practice and in training.

A systematic effort to rethink Freud's theory of the unconscious, aiming to separate out the different forms of unconsciousness. The logico-mathematical treatment of the subject is made easy because every concept used is simple and simply explained from first principles. Each renewed explanation of the facts brings the emergence of new knowledge from old material of truly great importance to the clinician and the theorist alike. A highly original book that ought to be read by everyone interested in psychiatry or in Freudian psychology.

This book reassesses the philosophical, psychological and, above all, the literary representations of the unconscious in the early twentieth century. This period is distinctive in the history of responses to the unconscious because it gave rise to a line of thought according to which the unconscious is an intelligent agent able to perform judgements and formulate its own thoughts. The roots of this theory stretch back to nineteenth-century British physiologists. Despite the production of a number of studies on modernist theories of the relation of the unconscious to conscious cognition, the degree to which the notion of the intelligent unconscious influenced modernist thinkers and writers remains understudied. This study seeks to look back at modernism from beyond the Freudian model. It is striking that although we tend not to explore the importance of this way of thinking about the unconscious and its relationship to consciousness during this period, modernist writers adopted it widely. The intelligent unconscious was particularly appealing to literary authors as it is intertwined with creativity and artistic novelty through its ability to move beyond discursive logic. The book concentrates primarily on the works of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, authors who engaged the notion of the intelligent unconscious, reworked it and offered it for the consumption of the general populace in varied ways and for different purposes, whether aesthetic, philosophical, societal or ideological.

This is Volume X in a series of twenty-one in a collection on Cognitive Psychology. Originally published in 1931, in this book, M. Montmasson is concerned to demonstrate a fact of the first importance, easily overlooked. The fact is this, that human inventions in the widest sense of the word, are products of the unconscious.

A systematic effort to rethink Freud's theory of the unconscious, aiming to separate out the different forms of unconsciousness. The logico-mathematical treatment of the subject is made easy because every concept used is simple and simply explained from first principles. Each renewed explanation of the facts brings the emergence of new knowledge from old material of truly great importance to the clinician and the theorist alike. A highly original book that ought to be read by everyone interested in psychiatry or in Freudian psychology.

This book traces the idea of the unconscious as it emerges in French and European literature. It discusses the functioning of the normal unconscious mind and provides examples of the abnormal unconscious in poems and literature. Psychiatric cases as they are understood today are illustrated as mirrored in literature describing the functioning of the disturbed mind.