Abstract: Minding the Baby, an interdisciplinary, relationship based home visiting program, was initiated to help young, at-risk new mothers keep their babies (and themselves) "in mind" in a variety of ways. The intervention--delivered by a team that includes a nurse practitioner and clinical social worker--uses a mentalization based approach; that is, we work with mothers and babies in a variety of ways to develop mothers' reflective capacities. This approach--which is an adaptation of both nurse home visiting and infant-parent psychotherapy models--seems particularly well suited to highly traumatized mothers and their families, as it is aimed at addressing the particular relationship disruptions that stem from mothers' early trauma and derailed attachment history. We discuss the history of psychoanalytically oriented and attachment based mother-infant intervention, the theoretical assumptions of mentalization theory, and provide an overview of the Minding the Baby program. The treatments of two teenage mothers and their infants are described.

Abstract: Many authors consider that patients suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) are hampered in their ability to metarepresent, which is the correct ascribing of states of mind to oneself and to others and the reflecting thereon. Although the ability to mentalize is generally described as being uniform, various authors pinpoint problems which appear to be of a diverse psychological nature. Some describe difficulties in identifying emotions or a shortfall in their regulation, others identify a lack of integration between representations of self and those of others, and yet others focus on the failure to distinguish between fantasy and reality. In the present research all sessions during the first year of therapy of four patients suffering from BPD were tape-recorded and transcribed, and then analyzed using the Metacognition Assessment Scale (MAS), which is designed for the evaluation of the ability to metarepresent in clinical reports. The results support the hypothesis that there is a metarepresentation impairment in BPD but that it is more selective than was thought until now. In particular, such patients maintain their ability to identify internal states, whereas they are impaired in the integration of representations of self and others and in the differentiation between fantasy and reality.

Abstract: There is evidence that Asperger syndrome is associated with delusional beliefs. Cognitive theories of delusions in psychosis literature propose a central role for impaired theory of mind ability in the development of delusions. The present study investigates the phenomenology of delusional ideation in Asperger syndrome. Fortysix individuals with Asperger syndrome participated and were found to have relatively high levels of delusional ideation, primarily grandiose or persecutory. Factors associated with delusional belief were anxiety, social anxiety and self-consciousness, but not theory of mind ability or autobiographical memory. The findings indicate that delusional belief is a prominent feature in Asperger syndrome, but do not support a mentalization based account. A preliminary cognitive model of delusions in Asperger syndrome is proposed and the theoretical and clinical implications of the findings are discussed.

Abstract: The terms mentalization and mentalizing have recently emerged in the psychoanalytic and psychodynamic literature, especially in relation to the treatment of people suffering from borderline personality disorder. This paper discusses the meaning, phenomenology, and clinical applications of the concept. Mentalizing can be related to similar ideas developed in relation to autism under the heading of ‘theory of mind’; Bion's alpha function in relation to deficits in thinking in people with psychotic processes; and a body of francophone psychoanalytic literature related to people suffering from somatization disorders who have difficulty in finding a language to describe emotions. In focusing on failure of mentalizing in people with borderline personality disorder, Fonagy and his co-workers have put forward a developmental theory in which the ability to monitor one's own and others’ thought processes is compromised. Clinical examples are described and the advent of this new concept into the psychoanalytic vernacular is welcomed.

Abstract: Aron, Harris, Introduction. Part I: Therapeutic Action. Ehrenberg, The Intimate Edge of Therapeutic Relatedness. Slochower, Holding: Something Old and Something New. Cooper, Levit, Old and New Objects in Fairbairnian and American Relational Theory. Slavin, Kriegman, Why the Analyst Needs to Change: Toward a Theory of Conflict, Negotiation, and Mutual Imfluence in the Therapeutic Process. Maroda, Show Some Emotion: Completing the Cycle of Affective Communication. Berman, Psychoanalytic Supervision: The Intersubjective Development. Jacobs, On Misreading and Misleading Patients: Some Reflections on Communications, Miscommunications, and Countertransference Enactments. Part II: Relational Perspectives on Development. Beebe, Lachmann, Representation and Internalization in Infancy: Three Principles of Salience. Fonagy, Target, Mentalization and the Changing Aims of Child Psychoanalysis. Coates, Having a Mind of One's Own and Holding the Other in Mind: Commentary on Paper by Peter Fonagy and Mary Target. Lyons-Ruth, The Two-Person Unconscious: Intersubjective Dialogue, Enactive Relational Representation, and the Emergence of New Forms of Relational Organization. Part III: Social and Cultural Dimensions of Relationality. Altman, Psychoanalysis and the Urban Poor. Dimen, Perversion Is Us: Eight Notes. Leary, Race, Self-Disclosure, and "Forbidden Talk": Race and Ethnicity in Contemporary Psychoanalytic Practice. Corbett, More Life: Centrality and Marginality in Human Development.

Abstract: A ‘Radical Simulationist’ account of how folk psychology functions has been developed by Robert Gordon. I argue that Radical Simulationism is false. In its simplest form it is not sufficient to explain our attribution of mental states to subjects whose desires and preferences differ from our own. Modifying the theory to capture these attributions invariably generates innumerable other false attributions. Further, the theory predicts that deficits in mentalizing ought to co-occur with certain deficits in imagining perceptually-based scenarios. I present evidence suggesting that this prediction is false, and outline further possible empirical tests of the theory.

Abstract: The concept of mentalization (Fonagy, Steele, Moran, Steele, & Higgitt, 1991) has been used to describe the way in which the child's ability to understand his own and others' minds crucially depends on the developmental opportunity to recognize himself as represented in the mind of another. Within the context of a case presented for supervision, this paper discusses the importance of mentalization or ‘reflective function’ in the development of the psychological self, drawing on recent attachment-related research. Peter Webber's film Girl with a Pearl Earring is also presented and discussed as illustration of the psychotherapeutic significance of searching for the individual's inner psychological potential.

Abstract: A Conceptual Complexity Account of Theory of Mind Development Matthew Phillips (phillips@sci.ccny.cuny.edu) Department of Biology, The City College of CUNY, Marshak Science Building J526, Convent Avenue at 138th Street, New York, NY 10031 USA Abstract: actions. Armed with such an understanding, 4-year-olds are able to successfully predict the behavior of someone acting on a false belief. Three-year-olds, on the other hand, are restricted to being able to represent another agent as entertaining a model of a situation in the world, even when the model isn’t veridical, according to Perner. Thus children of this age can understand when a belief is out of step with reality, and counterfactual situations generally. Strictly speaking, however, children at this age do not have the concept of belief at all; rather, they “associate” representations with other agents, without truly understanding how the association figures into the agent’s practical reasoning. When confronted with an FB situation, 3-year-olds, not receiving any cues that the agent (e.g., Maxi) is pretending that the chocolate is in the non-actual location, the child bases its prediction off of reality. By characterizing 3-year-olds this way, Perner is potentially able to explain a lot of the facility with mental states that 3-year-olds do have. For example, he explains the fact that children do successfully use mental state vocabulary correctly on many occasions. (Bartsch & Wellman, 1995) He can also explain 3-year-olds’ ability to use physical models to draw inferences about a real, perceptually available situation. (Perner, 1988, 1991) Most impressively, perhaps, he can explain the fact that 3-year- olds do not appear to be able to clearly distinguish between belief and pretense. (Perner et al. 1994, Perner 1995) One difficulty with Perner’s view is that he provides no direct evidence for the existence of a conceptual leap of the relevant sort at any point in development, and what evidence there is which bears on the question seems to point in the other direction. It has been found, for example, that simply adding the word “first” to the instructions in a FB task (‘Where will Maxi look first’) pushes the age of success down significantly. (Siegel & Beatty, 1991, and especially German et al., 2005: 65ff.) If younger children simply don’t have the concept of false belief, however, such a change should not help. This consideration encourages us to look for a more parsimonious account of childhood development. Experiments published by Wimmer & Perner (1983) appeared to show that young children, relatively fluent in the language of belief attribution, did not have the concept of false belief as applied to other people. Since the publication of these results there has been an enormous amount of research dedicated to understanding the cognitive and biological apparatus underlying our capacity for mentalizing, i.e. for attributing mental states to other individuals, and how this apparatus develops in children. The False Belief task has been the predominant, though by no means the only, experimental paradigm through which this task has been studied. Many theories of Theory of Mind (ToM) development have arisen from this research. In this paper, I will consider two influential such theories, namely those of Josef Perner et al. (1988, 1991, 1995), and Alan Leslie et al. (1987, 1994, 2005). I will observe some problems each view faces (drawing these problems in two cases from the literature), and then I will offer my own explanation of the developmental data. This explanation is motivated by past and contemporary investigations into the semantics of propositional attitude attributions. It holds that, for the sorts of ToM tasks considered in the literature such as the False Belief task, when children of a particular age fail at these tasks it is because the representations required for success are too conceptually complex for those children at that age. Finally, I will describe a direction for further experimentation for testing Leslie’s theory as well as my own. 1. Perner and Leslie In False Belief (FB) tasks, the subject predicts the behavior of an agent who within the course of the experiment has come to have a false belief (usually about the location of an object). Typically, children younger than 4 fail on these tasks, whereas older children (and adults) succeed. (E.g. Wimmer & Perner 1983.) In order to explain these results, Perner (1988, 1991) holds that children undergo significant conceptual change around age 4. In particular, children acquire the capacity for metarepresentation, that is, the capacity to represent an agent as having an internal representation or model of the world, and moreover to represent the semantic relation, truth or falsity, between that person’s model and the way the world is. That is, 4-year olds represent the agent’s representation, the world, and the semantic relation between the two. Being able to represent agents’ mental states in this way is the essence, Perner claims, of being able to understand that people use their representations of the world, true or false, to guide their The theory of Alan Leslie and his collaborators avoids the concern raised against Perner’s view. According to Leslie and collaborators, the developmental pattern with respect to ToM exhibited by children is a result of the collaboration of two mechanisms. The first is an innate “Theory of Mind

Abstract: Following a brief review of Freud's writings on trauma, the author discusses relevant theories of Bion, and in particular the concepts of the alpha function and the beta screen. A clinical example is presented in which the patient's relatively recent trauma in adulthood had become fused with prior related experiences, leading to a propensity for repeated enactments in analysis and a failure to learn from experience. Drawing on the analyst's alpha function, the patient was gradually able to use mentalization to transform her rigidly structured traumatic organization. The author highlights the roles of dreams/dream associations and of screen memories in the patient's analysis.

Abstract: The authors provide a context for this special section by arguing that the attachment relationships of infancy fulfil an evolutionary role in ensuring that the brain structures that come to subserve social cognition are appropriately organised and prepared to equip the individual for the collaborative existence with other people for which his or her brain was designed. Processes as fundamental as gene expression or changes in receptor densities can be seen as direct functions of the extent of understanding of mental states provided by the caregiving environment. If the attachment relationship is indeed a major organiser of brain development, it is even more important to understand the processes that underpin the transgenerational transmission of attachment patterns. The contributions of the papers in the special section to understanding the role of reflective function in the development of attachment and social cognition are reviewed, and the implications for the development of both theory and practice are explored.

Abstract: A developmental model is proposed applying attachment theory to complex social systems to promote social change. The idea of mentalizing communities is outlined with a proposal for three projects testing the model: ways to reduce bullying and create a peaceful climate in schools, projects to promote compassion in cities by a focus of end-of-life care, and a mentalization-based intervention into parenting style of borderline and substance abusing parents.

Abstract: This paper reviews neuroscientific advances across the therapeutic disciplines and outlines new potential insights into understanding the biology of the psychotherapeutic processes. In a quest to understand the modus operandi of psychotherapy, the author reviews the evolution of the biology of psychotherapy. The mechanisms involved in learning processes, such as memory and priming, attachment, and long-term consequences of early life trauma, demonstrate how brain structures can be affected by environmental changes. Finally, the author proposes that verbal and non-verbal aspects of the psychotherapeutic process mediate their therapeutic effects through biological changes as they work on primitive emotional reflexes and stimulate mentalization processes.