In my first works I addressed issues regarding perception, images (both individual and social), representation, symbolism, and internal images. This research was enriched by my psychoanalytic background and it led me to identify these elements in the traditional psychoanalytic descriptions of the development and functioning of the mind. This resulted in a continuous exchange between clinical practice, psychoanalytic theories and the outcomes of experimental psychology studies. An important milestone was my book The Protomental (1981), in which I outlined a theory of psychic development and the functioning of mind based on the cognitive elements that can be found in the typical psychoanalytic descriptions of affects. A collection of various articles was edited in Affects and Representation (1991). In the meantime I published Psychosexual Development and Cognitive Development (1983) where I described the development of the mind and its origins in the newborn, in terms of progressive symbolisations. This led me to enunciate a “psychoanalytical cognitivism” in the book Psychoanalytic Foundations of Clinical Psychology (1994). Here the origins, development and functioning of the mind were described in cognitive terms, as a progressive construction of functions, stemming from a processing of the individual’s internal and external vicissitudes. This description starts with Bion works on the origins of thought and proceeds from his clinical theoretical inferences to the individuation of mnestic traces implied in the mother-child relationship, as the basis for the construction of mental functioning. In this way a theory was outlined, as being no longer just descriptive, but also explanatory of the origins, development and functioning of the mind. The Theory of the Protomental was completed and improved in Birth and Construction of the Mind (1998). From this moment on, my clinical and theoretical investigations have always focused on the processes of construction of the mind, combining the psychoanalytic view of Bion’s approach not only with cognitive science but also with neuroscience, particularly in reference to the studies on memory. The Theory of the Protomental was therefore improved as an explanatory theory, in order to explain and not only to describe, both from a psychoanalytic and a psychophisiological stances, how mental functions are organized in the central nervous system beginning with the fetus.
Consequently, there followed Sexuality and Freud’s Drive Theory, Freud and the wrong conclusions of a genius course, and Psychoanalysis and Cognitivism: A new theory of the origin and functioning of the mind. Finally, I wrote The Protomental System which was translated into English and published by Brunner and Routledge as Constructing a Mind. A new base for Psychoanalytic Theory.