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A central theme in Silvano Arieti's work is the idea that cognition is elaborated over evolutionary structure. A performance is achieved through a traversal of the submerged residues of more archaic versions of the same performance persisting into the present as abstract forms just beneath the surface. According to this microgenetic view, cognition is organized into a hierarchy of levels with each level constituting a different mode of acting and perceiving in the world. The various components of cognition — thought, perception, memory and action, and affect — conform to this mode at successive levels of realization, while the system as a whole, as it unfolds, compresses the evolutionary history of the organism into a brief moment of psychological time.
Implicit in this account is the idea that levels in cognition emerge out of more preliminary levels, and that the emergence from one level to another occurs in a microtemporal framework linked to growth trends in the evolution of brain and behavior. Yet there are many unanswered questions in this statement. What is a level? What is meant by emergence? And what is the nature of psychological time? This paper, a tribute to the memory and the vision of Silvano Arieti, picks up where he left off, with a consideration of some of these problems in relation to a microgenetic theory of cognition.
Emergence is the idea that qualitative changes in a system may occur which have characteristics not anticipated by preceding