ABSTRACT
That the brain is indissolubly implied with the mind is a notion that is anything but ancient: until the end of the fifteenth century it was believed that brain was necessary to secrete "pituita", phlegm, and that the fulcrum of life, including mental life, was the heart. After the ideal of an easy organicism had collapsed, discussion started on what was to be understood by mind, and mental processes. The age-old problem of mind/brain relationship is solved in a feedback circuit: the mind generates the brain which in turn generates mind. Progress, by both psychological sciences and neurosciences, has shown that what was intuited under the name of affects is much vaster and different from what appears to the consciousness of individual; it is also, by full right, "mental". The neurosciences have confirmed today and detailed how the emotions are the first and fundamental form of cognition: originally, in the baby and the child, and throughout the life of man.
