In this essay, I read Pietro Verri’s “Discorso sull’indole del piacere e del dolore” (1781) in the context of eighteenth-century theories of the mind and by placing it in dialogue with Verri’s accounts of his experiences in his autobiographical writings and letters. I aim to demonstrate how Verri, working within Enlightenment epistemological categories, sketches an account of the self and of the human mind that shows an awareness of unconscious mental processes.