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Danilo Perestrello obtained a degree in Medicine in 1939. After having worked as a doctor, he was a General Psychology Assistant at the Medical Sciences School and a Propaedeutic and Clinical Medical Assistant at the National College of Medicine, following his teacher, Professor W. Berardinelli.
As a doctor, he was interested in his patients’ psychological aspects and thus became a psychiatrist, taking two exams: one for the National Service of Mental Illnesses and one for Free Psychiatry Teaching . His thesis received praise from Adolf Meyer. He was a doctor at the National Sanitary Education Service (at the Ministry of Education and Health), where he wrote several short books, published officially, including Almas Infantis (Child Souls), a set of 10 lectures giving guidance to parents (broadcast by the Ministry), which had over 10 editions.
An enthusiast of Freud’s ideas, he sought analytical training in Buenos Aires in 1946, as there were no psychoanalytical institutions in Rio de Janeiro at the time. In 1952, he qualified as an analyst at the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association. A pioneer of psychoanalysis in Rio de Janeiro, in 1959 he became one of the founders of the Brazilian Psychoanalytic Society of Rio de Janeiro. He was a forerunner of psychosomatic medicine in Brazil; after publishing several works in the field, he launched the book Medicina Psicossomática (Psychosomatic Medicine) in 1958, which was translated into Spanish in 1963. In 1973, he published the original work Medicina da Pessoa (Medicine of the Person) in which,
along with soma and psyche, he emphasized the importance of environment (social and family) for the understanding and etiology of illnesses.
With “Headache and Primal Scene”, Perestrello, in 1953, was the first Brazilian to present a paper at an international psychoanalytic congress and to be published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. Perestrello was elected the first president of the Brazilian Psychosomatic Associat