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This article is dedicated to the figure and work of Sante De Sanctis, an early 20th century psychiatrist and psychologist, the founder of Italian child neuropsychiatry and one of the makers of the establishment of experimental psychology in our country. We have chosen to examine De Sanctis's scientific legacy by favoring his famous work on dreams, because it seemed to us the scientific area in which his innovative integrated method of proceeding is most clearly delineated. We believe that the comparison with the contemporary work of Freud, with whom he was in correspondence, induced the Roman scientist to formulate, perhaps in response, his own, systematic theory of dreams, not to be placed before the psychoanalytic one, but which included a number of Freud's discoveries within a broader and more integrated conceptual body, maintaining a physiological, empirical and verifiable framework. His neuroscientific discoveries anticipated the achievements of contemporary scientific oneirology by several decades.
KEY WORDS: Dreams, Neuroscience, Psychoanalysis, Sante De Sanctis.