Mentalization

Mentalization is a psychological concept that describes the ability to understand the mental state of oneself and others based on overt behaviour. Mentalization can be seen as a form of imaginative mental activity, which allow us to perceive and interpret human behaviour in terms of intentional mental states (e.g. needs, desires, feelings, beliefs, goals, purposes, and reasons).

The concept of mentalization emerged in the psychoanalytic literature in the late 1960s, but diversified in the early 1990s when Simon Baron-Cohen, Uta Frith, and others merged it with research on neurobiological deficits that correlate with autism and schizophrenia. Concomitantly, Peter Fonagy and colleagues applied it to developmental psychopathology in the context of attachment relationships gone awry. More recently, several child mental health researchers such as Arietta Slade, John Grienenberger, Alicia Lieberman, Daniel Schechter, and Susan Coates have applied mentalization both to research on parenting and to clinical interventions with parents, infants, and young children.

Mentalization has implications for attachment-theory as well as self-development. According to Peter Fonagy, individuals without proper attachment (e.g. due to physical, psychologial or sexual abuse), can have greater difficulties in the development of mentalization-abilities. Attachment history partially determines the strength of mentalizing capacity of individuals. Securely-attached individuals tend to have had a mentalizing primary caregiver, and resultantly have more robust capacities to represent the states of their own and other people’s minds. Early childhood exposure to mentalization can serve to protect the individual from psychosocial adversity.