title: Sante De Sanctis (1862-1935), a forerunner of the 20th century research on sleep and dreaming.
abstract: This article aims to reconstruct the elements of continuity and/or discontinuity in Sante De Sanctis' (1862-1935) contributions in the scientific understanding of sleep and dreaming as compared to the scientific research of his time. An Italian psychologist and psychiatrist, De Sanctis, in his work conducted between the 19th and 20th centuries, has framed the study of dreams using multi-methodology. In addition, De Sanctis experimentally established the correspondence between the deep and desynchronization phases of sleep with respect to dreaming. In this context, De Sanctis' subjects described the periodicity of sleep and consciousness, influencing the explanations of the themes that modern sleep research has, after decades, systematically studied. We demonstrate that De Sanctis' work has been underestimated, and in our opinion, deserves to be reconsidered as a source of the psychophysiological explanation of dreams and sleep. Finally, we present a graphical representation of De Sanctis' psycho- and neurophysiological model of dreaming.
authors.affiliation: Archive of the History of Psychology, History of Psychology Laboratory, Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy.
authors.forename: Renato
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Foschi
authors.affiliation: Archive of the History of Psychology, History of Psychology Laboratory, Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy.
authors.forename: Giovanni Pietro
authors.initials: GP
authors.lastname: Lombardo
authors.affiliation: Archive of the History of Psychology, History of Psychology Laboratory, Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. Electronic address: giorgia.morgese@uniroma1.it.
authors.forename: Giorgia
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Morgese
mesh_terms: D004325:Dreams / Q000502:physiology* / Q000523:psychology*; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D012893:Sleep Wake Disorders / Q000266:history* / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology
keywords: Activation-synthesis hypothesis; Dreaming and sleeping phases; History of the dream psycho- and neurophysiology; REM and Non REM sleep