Sante De Sanctis, a pillar of child psychology and neuropsychiatry

«In the history of Italian psychology, De Sanctis was undoubtedly a leading figure, a “pillar” and can be considered one of the founders of the new discipline between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries» (Guido Cimino and Giovanni Pietro Lombardo)

An Umbrian you wouldn’t expect, unknown to most. Sante De Sanctis can be considered one of the founding fathers of Italian child psychology and neuropsychiatry. The psychiatrist and psychologist, born in Parrano (Terni) on February 7, 1862 (and died in Rome on February 20, 1935), after graduating in medicine and surgery from the University of Rome with a thesis in neuropathology, on aphasia, began practicing as a local physician in Orvieto and Ficulle, where he remained until 1891.

In 1892 he attended the pathological anatomy laboratory at the Santa Maria della Pietà asylum in Rome, where he studied the normal and pathological anatomy of the central nervous system; he was also appointed assistant at the psychiatric clinic of the University of Rome, where he remained until 1899. He also studied hypnotism with Auguste Forel in Zurich during a study trip (1893) and later in Paris with some of Jean-Martin Charcot’s students: the Parisian environment provided him with a source of inspiration for the scientific study of dreams – of which he was the only non-psychoanalyst Italian scholar. In 1896 he published Dreams and Sleep in Hysteria and Epilepsy, followed by Dreams: Clinical and Psychological Studies of an Alienist (1899); with Giuseppe Sergi he founded (1897) the fortnightly Journal of Psychology, Psychiatry, and Neuropathology.

Despite his sharp and certainly not banal mind, Sigmund Freud described him as “poor in ideas,” even though the two later exchanged extensive correspondence. Almost simultaneously with the Orthophrenic Normal School in Rome directed by Maria Montessori, in 1899 he founded the first kindergarten-school for the care and social rehabilitation of poor and mentally handicapped children and adolescents in an out-of-hospital setting. But he didn’t stop there, he also founded the first Child Neuropsychiatry department in Italy, a discipline of which he can be considered the father.

Sante De Sanctis (a destra) con i suoi collaboratori, da www.scienzainrete.it

In 1899, she began attending the pathological anatomy laboratory at the University of Rome, carrying out anatomical work under the guidance of E. Marchiafava.
After being rejected by the Higher Council of Public Education on the grounds that “psychology should be treated by a philosopher and not by a physiologist or psychiatrist,” she was awarded a teaching qualification in December 1901. In 1906, she held one of the first chairs of Experimental Psychology at the Faculty of Medicine in Rome. She then directed the Institute of Psychology at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Rome until 1930. She is credited with a treatise on experimental psychology, considered a work of great scientific commitment and systematicity. Her commitment to children with disabilities remained constant throughout her life: she dedicated monographic studies and original institutional solutions to this field.