Mauro Mancia: the Dream between Psychoanalysis and Neurosciences

Abstract

 “Dreaming, in any case, remains a mental activity and not a physiological process, even though it springs from this process.” This sentence of Mauro Mancia encapsulates the entire significance of his studies on sleeping/dreaming. A totality of observations and reflections grounded in neurophysiology and psychoanalysis which led him to study and to “see” the two faces of a problem that has engaged man’s attention since the remotest antiquity. Mancia has thus given us the resources to see the dream—and not only the dream—with the marvelled eye of the artist who seeks and finds a sense in things and at the same time with the cold eye of the scientist who demands of things only their how and wherefore.