Sante De Sanctis research on dreams and his relationships with German-speaking scholars

ABSTRACT — This paper aims to consider De Sanctis as a scholar who brought his professional and scientific skills that derive from medicine and psychiatry to the context of psychology, bringing about the founding of a clinical-differential and experimental methodology. In particular, De Sanctis was a proponent of the multiplicity of psychological methods. This generalist approach makes him a ‘‘scientist of dreams’’ and not just a ‘‘dreaming scientist’’ like the vast majority of those who had focused on this theme. This paper demonstrates that De Sanctis placed dreams within an evolutionary framework that saw dreams both in terms of phases of mental activity (waking consciousness and dreaming consciousness) and in terms of the levels of cerebral activity. Exploring the German sources of the psychology of dreams of De Sanctis (Karl Albert Scherner, Heinrich Spitta, and Friedrich Heerwagen), we find that the majority of contact was with the scholars in Dorpat who developed and used some methodologies (dream questionnaires, psychophysical techniques, the depth-of-sleep curve) that De Sanctis later adopted. Despite this extensive contact with international research, De Sanctis’s work was nonetheless an autonomous and original synthesis of the 19th- and early 20th-century psychology of dreams.