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The author presumes the existence of a “relative isomorphism” between the mental processes underpinning the mother-child relationship and those activated in the relationship between patient (child or adult) and analyst. He considers the processes of imitation, representation, and identification during emotional and cognitive child development, beginning with the ideas of Piaget and ending with the most recent observations of the cognitivists. These characterize a child who is immediately given a “primary intrasubjectivity,” able to construct representations of the outer world (beginning from the intrauterine). Through this excursus, the author defines his own position, which is a synthesis of different present positions: the pulsional and the relational. Mancia qualifies the pulsion as desire and its relation with the environment in which it has to be satisfied. It is from the quality of this meeting that different emotional forms and potentialities grow.
For the author, thought cannot totally identify with language, as Piaget suggested, but with the transformative process which gives symbolic meaning