Quotes About Mentalizing

Deficits in mentalizing have also been linked with identity diffusion

Mentalizing is a key skill because our sense of personal continuity is dependent on envisioning the thoughts and feelings we had in the past and how these relate to our current experiences, and because how we envision ourselves in the future is rarely in terms of physical attributes (after middle age, certainly) but rather in terms of projecting ourselves as a thinking and feeling person.

We've done fMRI scans of people taking the 'Reading the Eyes' test, and what we've found is that the amygdala lights up in trying to figure out people's thoughts and feelings. In people with autism, they show highly reduced amygdala activity.

Cognitive empathy, sometimes called perspective taking or mentalizing, is the ability to recognize and understand another person's emotions. Affective empathy, often called experience sharing, is one's own emotional attunement with another person's experience.

We see that hyperactivity and reward areas are important when the bubble's rising. People getting caught up in it. We also see areas involving mentalizing, which means thinking about other people: Who's buying? Who's selling? Do they know something? We see emotional areas before the crash that indicate a sense of uncertainty or dread.

If your suffering makes me suffer, if I feel what you feel, that's empathy in the sense that I'm interested in here. But if I understand that you are in pain without feeling it myself, this is what psychologists describe as social cognition, social intelligence, mind reading, theory of mind, or mentalizing. It's also sometimes described as a form of empathy—"cognitive empathy" as opposed to "emotional empathy," which is most of my focus.

the term mentalizing—a verb. This is because mentalizing is an activity, a way of being, a general inquisitive stance rather than a set of specific techniques. Our aim is to explore this activity together with the patient.

Mentalizing virtuously means being authentically interested and curious in exploring the richness of possible realities. Active questioning expresses curiosity, but should not be expected to yield an unequivocal answer, but progress towards a conceptualization of alternatives (Skårderud and Fonagy 2012

The aim of our treatment structure is to organize different therapeutic contexts in such ways that they separately, and, not least, together, enhance competences for reflexivity and self-regulation as well as symptom reduction. A rationale for a combination of different therapeutic contexts is that mentalizing is challenged in different ways and at different levels in the different contexts, as it is in everyday life, and the different settings provide diverse opportunities to practice .

Good mentalizing refers to mental and relational strengths as curiosity, perspective taking, forgiveness, reflective contemplation, a trusting attitude, humility, playfulness , willingness to assume responsibility and accept accountability and being aware of one's impact on others (Bateman and Fonagy 2016

Insecurity in attachment relationships is a signal of limitation in mentalizing skills. We find that the traditional classification of attachment patterns may be helpfully reinterpreted in this context as indication of a relatively good (secure attachment), or relatively poor (insecure attachment) capacity to manage or cope with intimate interpersonal relationships. An absence of mentalizing capacity under stress is signaled by the disorganization of the attachment system.

we believe that a number of the ideas discussed in this book—such as the social biofeedback theory of parental mirroring, the teleological and intentional stance, reflective function, the psychic equivalence and pretend modes of psychic reality, the alien self, mentalizing, affectivity, and, of course, affect regulation and mentalization—suggest a genuinely new direction for psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.