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In Mancia's book two different ways of research and study intersect reflecting the author's dual identity as a psycho-analyst and a neurophysiologist. A very interesting, complicated and problematic picture emerges, the various perspectives intertwining while the author seeks to match them, maintaining a psychoanalytic stand-point, and, however, differentiating the various levels in the hierarchy of his investigations.
Mancia starts by tracing the historiography of dreams, which begins in the world of primitive man where dreams had a prophetic meaning, becoming the ultimate master of human life. The prophetic nature of dreams persisted also in the Greek world. Indeed the tragedy of Oedipus begins with Jocasta's dream which predicts all the future disasters which will befall her family. It is only some centuries later that a classification of dreams is achieved: in the writings of the apologist Tertullian, the dream takes on a theological significance, reflecting the presence of the divine or the satanic.
The scientific and literary journey of the dream is thus initiated and the Traumdeutung crowns it by proposing a theory of the dream worlds, which Freud had already anticipated in the Project for a Scientific Psychology. By referring to the Project, Mancia is able to reply to those who maintain that in this work Freud is essentially monistic in his mind-body conception, an impossible equation given that Freud's model was not neurophysiological but rather hydrodynamic: a useful metaphor to describe psychic processes and to free himself of an equation which would have flattened the mental dimension.
The following chapter on the psychoethobiology of the dream leads psychoanalysts into unfamiliar territory which is nonetheless stimulating, given the number of directions which can be pursued from there. Following the famous discoveries of Aserinsky and Kleitman on the various phases of sleep (REM and N-REM), neurophysiological and psychophysiological research has accumulate