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One of Silvano Arieti's many seminal contributions to the social sciences was his demonstration of the importance of cognitive elements in the regulation of psychic life. While fully cognizant of the impact of biological drives on both normal and pathological behavior, Arieti strives to show that our inner belief systems — our personal ideology, as it were — is foremost in our relative resistance or vulnerability to mental illness (Arieti, 1967, 1974). For Arieti, the basis of our mental life consisted of rather elaborate and sophisticated cognitive structures, such as the way we perceive ourselves and others who are important to us, rather than in the transformation of instinctual urges. Defenses, transference and other fundamental psychoanalytic concepts could be interpreted as cognitive rather than energetic constructs.
Although not readily available to consciousness, these belief systems would alter the manner in which experiences are interpreted and in this way give rise to and be influenced by emotions. Positive or negative emotions would result from how one actualized (or failed to actualize) a specific view of an external situation or of the self and others. However, if these emotions became overly powerful, they could affect subsequent cognition at a conscious level. In this way, cognition would affect our felt emotions, which in turn would affect our conscious cognition. This formal process revolves around the state of the self and how that state is transformed in instances of extreme emotion such as joy, anxiety or depression. This article is a further application of this model to affective disorders, particularly to severe depression in its various forms.