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The first paper of this issue, “The early unrepressed unconscious in relation to Matte-Blanco's thought,” is one of the last papers written by Mauro Mancia , a training analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, professor emeritus of human physiology at the University of Milan, and of one of the pioneers of the most fascinating new frontiers of our field, the dialogue between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences. A few months before his death (the day before the inauguration of the International Psychoanalytical Association [IPA] Berlin Congress), I was again able to experience his passion for interdisciplinary research at the workshop on “mirror neurons” and their implications for psychoanalysis, which he had organised with the Italian neurophysiologist Vittorio Gallese at the annual congress of the European Psychoanalysis Federation held in Barcelona.
He had published a paper with the title “On the beginning of the mental life in the foetus” as far back as 1981, and the same volume of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis also featured a paper on the ego-ideal that he had written together with Donald Meltzer. The important role he played in building bridges between English and Italian psychoanalysis materialised also in his promotion of and introduction to the Italian edition of the Collected papers of another colleague of wide interests, . His scientific openness had also allowed him to review in 1996 Stephen Mitchell's Hope and dread in psychoanalysis for the Italian Rivista di psicoanalisi and to conclude qualifying him as “a maître à penser of contemporary psychoanalysis.” Very curious and extremely productive, he kept being very creative all along: in 2006, he was the editor of the important volume Psychoanalysis and neuroscience (Springer), and shortly before his death, Feeling the words. Neuropsychoanalytic understanding of memory and the unconscious (Italian edition, ) came out in the prestigious New Library of Psychoanalysis.
It is no wonder that,