Even though the extraordinary advances in neuroscience and brain imaging technologies during the last three decades have indisputably established that the brain is involved in every mental activity, it has yet to be clarified how cerebral activities produce or convert into mental events. The majority of explicatory efforts thus far conducted have focused on Freud's hypothesis that the mind is a structured entity consisting of ego, superego, and id, which control all mental experiences. In this ambitious and deeply thoughtful work, psychiatrist Christiaan D. van der Velde employs a different approach, viz., an analysis of the origin, nature and functionality of the common denominators of all mental events: our mental representations. This analysis indicates that mental representations are not products of the mind, but "autochthonously occurring phenomena, which originate as activated "cerebral engrams of previously experienced visual percepts whose gestalts determine the cognitive content of our mental representations. Each gestalt is experienced with a sense of having experienced before. This sense of cognition cannot be explained by any cerebral process or function. By applying a new interpretation of the philosophical concept of dialectics the author conceives cognition as an empirical epiphenome-non, which results from our simultaneous experiences of specific differences between internal images and actual visual percepts. The author also provides lucid discussions of how the cerebral/empirical composition of mental representations enables us to clarify most psychological functions. This cogent, incisive analysis by a leading psychotherapist and researcher in cognition provides muchto ponder and many insights into the nature of the mind.