P Fonagy
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 1358713 |
|---|---|
| NOME | P Fonagy |
| PRENOMES | P |
| SOBRENOME | Fonagy |
| ASSINATURA | FONAGY P |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0229-0091 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 120 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 480 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 120 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1987 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 14 |
Forgotten grievers
Serious youth violence is a significant social concern in the United Kingdom. This qualitative study explores the reported recommendations for the offer of care for families and members of the wider social network who have been bereaved by youth-violence-related homicide. This UK-based study used naturalistic, semi-structured interviews with 24 participants, including immediate and extended family and one peer. The study was initiated and co-prod…
University Students' Post‐Traumatic Symptoms in the Aftermath of Covid ‐19
Attachment theory and research
Attachment theory is one of the core theories proposed for child and family social work, but concerns have been raised regarding misunderstandings and misapplications. Misinformation about attachment is widespread, and texts and teaching on attachment theory often emphasise aspects of the theory that have limited value for applied practice while other elements with greater practice value are often overlooked. As an international group of social w…
Mapping the Adolescent Mind
INTRODUCTION: Adolescence is a period of heightened vulnerability to psychopathology, when capacities for mentalising and interpersonal trust develop rapidly. This study investigated how configurations of reflective functioning (RF) and epistemic trust (ET) differentiate patterns of internalizing and externalizing problems in youth. METHODS: In a community sample of 688 adolescents (47.8% female; M = 15.51 years, SD = 1.80), latent profile analys…
Assessing Epistemic Trust in Common Mental Health Disorders
Epistemic trust is the capacity of an individual to assimilate new information and engage with their surroundings. This study focused on the Epistemic Trust, Mistrust, and Credulity Questionnaire (ETMCQ) among individuals seeking treatment for common mental health issues (N = 378) compared to a non-clinical group (N = 357). The study aimed to validate the ETMCQ clinically, assess its consistency across clinical groups and community controls, and …
Practitioner Review
Attachment theory, with its core concepts, perspectives, and insights developed over the past five decades, is influential for professionals working with young children. However, practitioners face challenges translating attachment theory and research into practical applications. This manifests in attachment myths, theoretical misinterpretations, and inconsistency of application. This state‐of‐the‐art review is authored by 47 attachment researche…
Parent Learning Groups in Alternative Provision
These preliminary findings indicate that a school-based parent learning group combining psychoeducation, mentalization-based practice and peer support is feasible and associated with meaningful improvements in parental reflective functioning and self-efficacy. Parent narratives of transformed relational practices and shifts from reactive to reflective engagement echo broader literature demonstrating that group-delivered mentalization-oriented pro…
Study protocol for a randomised evaluation of a brief psychological intervention for clinically stressed parents of adolescents
Adolescence can be a stressful and difficult period for young people and parents, with many changes occurring during this time, and a heightened risk of mental health problems for adolescents. The quality of parenting an adolescent receives and the relationship between parents and adolescents is of particular importance during this time and predicts adolescent outcomes. Parenting is a modifiable risk factor which can be targeted to improve outcom…
Acceptability of Circle of Security-Parenting groups in NHS community perinatal mental health services in England
Perinatal mental health (PMH) difficulties are prevalent and often accompanied by parent-infant relationship difficulties. National Health Service community PMH services (PMHS) support birthing parents (typically mothers) experiencing moderate-to-severe and complex mental health difficulties. While PMHS primarily address maternal mental health, treatment can include interventions targeting parent-infant relationships. The Circle of Security-Paren…
Addressing the social determinants of youth mental health in Newham and Northern Devon
Despite increasing efforts to provide support for children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing, rates of poor wellbeing and probable mental health disorders continue to rise. This underscores the need for approaches that target the root causes and social determinants underlying these issues. This paper offers reflections on efforts to address these determinants at the local level, drawing on learning from the co-design phase of Kailo, …
Forgotten grievers
Serious youth violence is a major social concern in the United Kingdom. The current qualitative study explores the quality and consistency of support provided to individuals bereaved by youth-violence-related homicide. A qualitative study using naturalistic, semi-structured interviews was conducted with 24 participants, including members of the immediate and extended family and a peer. Interviews were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis to…
Beyond Descriptive Models of Personality Problems
You cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it.Albert EinsteinChristopher J. Hopwood (2024) provides a timely, comprehensive, and impartial snapshot of the field of personality psych
Global Assessment of Relational Functioning
While the prevalence of type 1 diabetes (T1D) in the pediatric population has been increasing dramatically in recent years, most youths with T1D do not meet the treatment targets recommended by the American Diabetes Association. The multiple self‐report scales for parents and adolescents that have been investigated in relation to treatment adherence and glycemic control in pediatric T1D show limited predictive abilities. This longitudinal observa…
Bridging the Gap
INTRODUCTION: Methodological and ethical arguments support the involvement of individuals with lived experience in research to reduce engagement barriers and ensure those directly affected by studies contribute to knowledge generation. However, there is limited evidence on the impact of including researchers with lived experience of serving a prison or community sentence in clinical trials. This qualitative study aimed to explore the value of inv…
Rural Community‐Based Interventions to Improve the Mental Health and Wellbeing of Children and Young People
This study synthesised evidence on community‐based interventions targeting the mental health and wellbeing of children and young people in rural and remote locations. Scoping review methodology was employed. Searches of six databases were conducted. Titles and abstracts ( N = 6457) were screened against inclusion and exclusion criteria, followed by full text screening ( N = 61). Twelve publications reporting 10 unique interventions were identifie…
A cross‐sectional investigation into the role of intersectionality as a moderator of the relation between youth adversity and adolescent depression/anxiety symptoms in the community
BACKGROUND: Adolescents exposed to adversity show higher levels of depression and anxiety, with the strongest links seen in socially/societally disadvantaged individuals (e.g., females, low socioeconomic status [SES]), as well as neurodivergent individuals. The intersection of these characteristics may be important for the differential distribution of adversity and mental health problems, though limited findings pertain to the extent to which int…
Shared Knowledge in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)
According to the Theory of Natural Pedagogy, object-directed emotion may provide different information depending on the context: in a communicative context, the information conveys culturally shared knowledge regarding the emotional valence of an object and is generalizable to other individuals, whereas, in a non-communicative context, information is interpreted as a subjective disposition of the person expressing the emotion, i.e., personal pref…
Dimensional model of adolescent personality pathology, reflective functioning, and emotional maltreatment
These insights carry substantial clinical implications, especially for devising integrated, trauma-informed strategies for adolescents with personality pathologies. This is particularly relevant for enhancing mentalizing and bolstering personality consolidation among adolescent CEA survivors
Mentalizing as a Predictor of Well-Being and Emotion Regulation
Background: In recent years, mentalizing - the capacity to understand one's own and others' intentional mental states in social contexts - has been considered to be a protective capacity that enables adaptive processing of stress-related emotional arousal, benefits general well-being and underpins adaptive emotion regulation. Objective: Several studies using cross-sectional research designs have demonstrated the potential health-promoting effect …
Linking mentalizing capacity, shame, and depressive symptoms in the context of childhood maltreatment
Experiences of childhood maltreatment have been shown to be a crucial predictor of depressive symptoms. This study investigated the association between a history of maltreatment and depressive symptoms in a mixed sample of adults, exploring whether feelings of shame and impairments in mentalizing mediate this association and potentially represent health-affecting factors associated with an increase in depressive symptoms. Further, the association…
Examination of a case of “treatment failure” in long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy for treatment-resistant depression
Randomized controlled trials have reported psychoanalytic psychotherapy to improve longer-term post-treatment outcomes in patients with treatment-resistant depression. In this case study, we examine the therapy process of a female trial participant diagnosed with treatment-resistant depression. Structured clinical assessments indicated that the patient's level of depression remained unchanged during and after treatment. Over the course of the the…
To trust or not to trust in the thrall of the Covid-19 pandemic
Establishing an association between ACEs and conspiracy endorsement further increases the evidence for early childhood adversities' far-reaching and detrimental effects. By including epistemic trust and personality functioning, these findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms in the way that ACEs may be associated with conspiracy endorsement
Cambridge Guide to Mentalization-Based Treatment (MBT)
A complete and practical guide offering a concise overview of mentalization-based treatment (MBT) and its application in different situations and with different groups of patients to help improve the treatment of mental health disorders. Featuring an introduction to mentalizing and the evidence base to support it, followed by the principles of MBT and the basic clinical model in individual and group psychotherapy. Other chapters offer extensive c…
The relationship between global distress, mentalizing and well-being in a German teacher sample
Many studies have linked global distress including higher psychological symptom severity and high levels of stress with low levels of well-being among teachers, indicating a need to identify and empirically evaluate protective factors. Mentalizing—the capacity to understand behavior in terms of intentional mental states—may be a candidate protective factor to mediate this association, enhancing well-being in the face of high levels of global dist…
Affektregulierung, Mentalisierung und die Entwicklung des Selbst
Dieses Buch ist eine groß angelegte Synthese, in der es um das spannungsreiche Gegen- und Miteinander der Psychoanalyse und der Bindungstheorie geht. Es gelingt, eine Brücke zwischen den beiden Disziplinen zu schlagen, indem die Autoren das Bindungskonzept neu beleuchten. Es geht nicht mehr nur um die Herstellung von Bindung an sich, sondern darum, das Kind durch sichere Beziehungen der Art auszustatten, daß es das Verstehen mentaler Zustände im …
Mentalization and the changing aims of child psychoanalysis
The interface of empirical work with child psychoanalysis at the Anna Freud Centre is part of the tradition of systematic study and research pioneered over many years by Anna Freud and her colleagues (A. Freud, 1962; Sandier, 1962; A. Freud 1965). George Moran initiated a program of work at the Anna Freud Centre, which, starting with the work on juvenile onset diabetes (Fonagy et al., 1991b), led us to ask fundamental questions about the nature o…
A Genuinely Developmental Theory of Sexual Enjoyment and Its Implications for Psychoanalytic Technique
A small computer-assisted word frequency analysis, indicating the extent of explicit concern with sexuality in the psychoanalytic literature, has revealed an apparent decline of psychoanalytic interest in psychosexuality. The apparent decline may be related to the limitations of drive theory and object relations approaches in offering persuasive and comprehensive accounts of the psychosexual. A new model of human sexual experience is proposed, ro…
Playing With Reality
This paper is a contribution towards understanding the difficulties of severely borderline patients as they are uncovered within the psychoanalytic process. The authors aim to extend a model from previous papers, bringing a developmental perspective to bear on self-representation and self-organisation. This model rests on an understanding of the child's experience of psychic reality in both normal and neurotic people. The authors explore the rele…
The Rooting of the Mind in the Body
The relationship between psychoanalysis and attachment theory is complex indeed. A brief review of the psychoanalytic literature as it concerns attachment theory and research, and of the attachment literature as it pertains to psychoanalytic ideas, demonstrates an increasing interest in attachment theory within psychoanalysis. Some of the difficulties that attachment theory faces in relation to psychoanalytic ideas are traced to its links to the …
Measuring the Ghost In the Nursery
This paper presents a summary of the Anna Freud Centre-University College London, Parent-Child Project. Its most important finding was that the security of the infants' relationship with both parents at 12 and 18 months could be predicted on the basis of qualitative aspects of the parents' accounts of their own childhoods collected before the birth of the child. This confirmed Selma Fraiberg's observations concerning the reemergence of childhood …
Playing with reality
The authors explore the interpersonal aspects of the early development of an experience of external reality and the roots of this experience in primary intersubjectivity. They suggest some implications that this has for psychoanalytic work with the patient's experience of external reality. They argue that the external world is not an independently existing ‘given’, for the infant to discover, as is sometimes implicitly assumed. Infants acquire kn…
The Parent's Capacity to Treat the Child as a Psychological Agent
Recent studies of the relationship between parenting and child development have included a focus on the parent's capacity to treat the child as a psychological agent. Several constructs have been developed to refer to this capacity, for example maternal mind‐mindedness, reflective functioning, and parental mentalizing. In this review article, we compare and contrast different constructs from diverse theoretical backgrounds that have been develope…
Towards a better use of psychoanalytic concepts
It is well known that there is a lack of consensus about how to decide between competing and sometimes mutually contradictory theories, and how to integrate divergent concepts and theories. In view of this situation the IPA Project Committee on Conceptual Integration developed a method that allows comparison between different versions of concepts, their underlying theories and basic assumptions. Only when placed in a frame of reference can simila…
The Child Attachment Interview
While well-established attachment measures have been developed for infancy, early childhood, and adulthood, a "measurement gap" has been identified in middle childhood, where behavioral or representational measures are not yet sufficiently robust. This article documents the development of a new measure--the Child Attachment Interview (CAI)--which seeks to bridge this gap. The CAI is a semistructured interview, in which children are invited to des…
Attachment and Borderline Personality Disorder
The author outlines his concept of reflective function or mentalization, which is defined as the capacity to think about mental states in oneself and in others. He presents evidence to suggest that the capacity for reflective awareness in a child's caregiver increases the likelihood of the child's secure attachment, which in turn facilitates the development of mentalization in the child. He proposes that a secure attachment relationship offers th…
Predictors of Outcome in Child Psychoanalysis
Under Anna Freud's guidance, the Anna Freud Centre developed a rigorous approach to the collection of child psychoanalytic data. Material contained in detailed diagnostic assessments and weekly written reports of 763 cases treated in intensive and nonintensive therapy has now been subjected to systematic study. This is the first, retrospective stage of a major investigation of child psychoanalytic outcome, carried out in collaboration with Yale U…
Some Complexities in the Relationship of Psychoanalytic Theory to Technique
This paper considers the current fragmentation of psychoanalytic theory as a result of the illusorily close association of practice and theory. The author argues that the politically motivated assertion of a direct connection between theory and practice should be set aside and that practice should be liberated from theory, permitting theory to evolve in the context of radically modified patterns of practice. If theory were decoupled from practice…
Randomized Controlled Trial of Parent-Infant Psychotherapy for Parents With Mental Health Problems and Young Infants
There is a dearth of good-quality research investigating the outcomes of psychoanalytic parent-infant psychotherapy (PIP). This randomized controlled trial investigated the outcomes of PIP for parents with mental health problems who also were experiencing high levels of social adversity and their young infants (<12 months). Dyads were clinically referred and randomly allocated to PIP or a control condition of standard secondary and specialist pri…
Intergenerational Transmission of Attachment in Abused and Neglected Mothers
There are still important gaps in our knowledge regarding the intergenerational transmission of attachment from mother to child, especially in mothers with childhood histories of abuse and neglect (CA&N). This study examined the contributions of reflective function concerning general attachment relationships, and specifically concerning trauma, as well as those of maternal attachment states of mind to the prediction of infant attachment disorgani…
Infant‐Mother Attachment at One Year Predicts Children’s Understanding of Mixed Emotions at Six Years
Data from the six‐year follow up of a longitudinal study investigating intergenerational patterns of attachment and the effects of early relationships upon subsequent social, emotional and cognitive development are presented. Around the time of their sixth birthday, 63 children participated in an affect understanding task, involving cartoon diagrams depicting social and emotional dilemmas. As predicted, performance on this task, assessed in terms…
Rejoinder to Harold Blum
The author's main disagreement with Harold Blum is over Blum's contention that symptomatic improvement is directly linked to the recovery of memories. The idea that memories are laid down in childhood and preserved until the time of their later recovery flies in the face of what we now understand as the creation of memories by the neurobiological systems underpinning this aspect of mental function. No evidence directly links symptomatic improveme…
The Reflective Fostering Programme
Looked after children represent a vulnerable group in society, many of whom are exposed to maltreatment, particularly in the form of relational trauma, prior to placement with a foster family. Challenging behaviours can place foster placements at risk and looked after children often confront the possibility of placement breakdown. A carer’s capacity to retain a robust understanding of the children in their care as autonomous individuals with need…
When Is Truth Relevant
The authors argue that the experience of knowing and having the truth about oneself known in the context of therapy is not an end in itself; rather, it is important because the trust engendered by this experience (epistemic trust or trust in new knowledge) opens one up to learning about one's social world and finding better ways to live in it. The authors consider the consequences of a lack of epistemic trust in terms of psychopathology
Borderline personality disorder, mentalization, and the neurobiology of attachment
We discuss the neural and neurobiological underpinnings of the core features of borderline personality disorder (BPD), including emotion dysregulation, impulsivity, disturbed interpersonal functioning, identity diffusion, and feelings of inner pain. We review neurobiological research that supports a developmental, biobehavioral switch‐model of the relationship between mentalization, stress, and attachment. Although it is likely that there are dif…
Feeling safe in school∗
This paper advances the hypothesis that for a child to feel safe and to learn at school certain psychological conditions must be met. These conditions are described using concepts derived from psychoanalytic research and include; a background of SAFETY and a feeling of WELL BEING derived from a healthy ego with perceptual skills appropriate to the task, a HOLDING environment of adults who can respond appropriately to the child's developmental nee…
The development of psychopathology from infancy to adulthood
A model for the development of this mechanism is offered as well as evidence for it from five areas: (1) the nature of the association of early attachment and later cognitive functioning, (2) accumulating evidence for the association between secure attachment and the facility with which internal states are understood and represented, (3) the limited predictive value of early attachment classification, (4) the studies of the biological functions o…
In search of shared and nonshared environmental factors in security of attachment
The current article presents results from a twin study of genetic and environmental components of maternal sensitivity and infant attachment and their association. The sample consisted of 136 twin pairs from 2 sites: Leiden, the Netherlands, and London, UK. Maternal sensitivity was assessed in the home at 9-10 months, and infant attachment security was observed in the laboratory at 12 months. The study yielded little evidence that genetic factors…
Psychoanalytic Research and the Ipa
This paper traces the chequered history of formal psychoanalytic research within the century-long development of psychoanalysis as theory and practice. It describes the official involvement of the American Psychoanalytic Association in the support of psychoanalytic research since 1970, and of the International Psychoanalytical Association since the 1980s. In the IPA, this has consisted of the introduction at the 1987 Montreal Congress of two half…
Beyond Mentalizing
in the process of cultural transmission, and propose that mentalizing is key to the establishment of epistemic trust-that is to say, an experience of trust that enables the individual to absorb and use the knowledge they are being offered. We suggest that psychoanalysis can be viewed as a paradigmatic example of a process of transferring knowledge from one human being (the teacher, the caregiver, the analyst) to another (the learner, the young pe…
The assessment of representational risk (ARR)
There are few clinically valid tools that can be used to assess potential parent–infant relational risk. This study describes the development and initial validation of the assessment of representational risk (ARR) coding system to be applied to the parent development interview (Slade, A., Aber, J. L., Bresgi, I., Berger, B., & Kaplan, M. (2004). The Parent Development Interview – Revised . Unpublished protocol. New York, NY: The City University o…
Psychoanalysis and diabetic control
The records of the 3 1/2 year, five times weekly psychoanalysis of a diabetic teenager with recurrent diabetic imbalance were examined using non‐experimental single‐case design methodology. A selected set of analytic themes was operationalized and independently rated for each week of the psychoanalysis. A weekly index of the quality of diabetic balance was also obtained for the same period. Time series analysis was used to examine the relationshi…
A follow‐up study of patients treated for benzodiazepine dependence
By interviewing and administering questionnaires to 63 patients one to five years after treatment for benzodiazepine dependence the long‐term success rate was examined together with factors associated with outcome. Fifty‐four per cent of patients had permanently withdrawn from medication at follow‐up. Most of those who were successful continued to experience psychiatric symptoms after discharge. Significantly more women than men managed to withdr…
Adaptive probit estimation and body size
Studies of body size estimation are frequently used to identify body‐image disturbances in clinical populations. No clear pattern of results has, however, so far emerged. One reason for this may be that studies confound non‐sensory influences on performance deriving from motivational components with the observer's discriminative sensitivity. This study introduces an adaptive version of the method of constant stimuli and probit analysis (APE) to d…
Maternal Representations of Attachment during Pregnancy Predict the Organization of Infant-Mother Attachment at One Year of Age
Peter Fonagy, Howard Steele, Miriam Steele, Maternal Representations of Attachment during Pregnancy Predict the Organization of Infant-Mother Attachment at One Year of Age, Child Development, Vol. 62, No. 5 (Oct., 1991), pp. 891-905
The capacity for understanding mental states
Epidemiologists and psychoanalysts have been equally concerned about the intergenera-tional concordance of disturbed patterns of attachment. Mary Main's introduction of the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) has provided the field with an empirical tool for examining the concordance of parental and infant attachment patterns. In the context of a prospective study of the influence of parental patterns of attachment assessed before the birth of the f…
Measuring the Ghost In the Nursery
This paper presents a summary of the Anna Freud Centre-University College London, Parent-Child Project. Its most important finding was that the security of the infants' relationship with both parents at 12 and 18 months could be predicted on the basis of qualitative aspects of the parents' accounts of their own childhoods collected before the birth of the child. This confirmed Selma Fraiberg's observations concerning the reemergence of childhood …
Mental representations from an intergenerational cognitive science perspective
Associations among Attachment Classifications of Mothers, Fathers, and Their Infants
The relation of attachment status, psychiatric classification, and response to psychotherapy.
Predictors of Outcome in Child Psychoanalysis
Under Anna Freud's guidance, the Anna Freud Centre developed a rigorous approach to the collection of child psychoanalytic data. Material contained in detailed diagnostic assessments and weekly written reports of 763 cases treated in intensive and nonintensive therapy has now been subjected to systematic study. This is the first, retrospective stage of a major investigation of child psychoanalytic outcome, carried out in collaboration with Yale U…
Moments of change in psychoanalytic theory
This commentary briefly summarizes the model proposed by the Boston Group and attempts to place it in the context of attachment theory and other integrational attempts between cognitive science and psychoanalysis. The clinical implications of these ideas are considered, with particular reference to therapeutic technique and the role of the therapist, as a “new object.” Some suggestions for the further development of the model are considered, in p…
Prevention, the appropriate target of infant psychotherapy
The aim of this paper is to evaluate the case for preventive interventions in infancy aimed at the reduction of childhood psychopathology. The paper considers the terminology of prevention and the case for prevention in infancy. It is argued that increased knowledge concerning the developmental pathways involved in many psychological disorders opens the door to prevention initiatives. An overview of recent prevention trials is provided and the im…
Mentalization and the changing aims of child psychoanalysis
The interface of empirical work with child psychoanalysis at the Anna Freud Centre is part of the tradition of systematic study and research pioneered over many years by Anna Freud and her colleagues (A. Freud, 1962; Sandier, 1962; A. Freud 1965). George Moran initiated a program of work at the Anna Freud Centre, which, starting with the work on juvenile onset diabetes (Fonagy et al., 1991b), led us to ask fundamental questions about the nature o…
Effectiveness of Partial Hospitalization in the Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder
OBJECTIVE: This study compared the effectiveness of psychoanalytically oriented partial hospitalization with standard psychiatric care for patients with borderline personality disorder. METHOD: Thirty-eight patients with borderline personality disorder, diagnosed according to standardized criteria, were allocated either to a partially hospitalized group or to a standard psychiatric care (control) group in a randomized controlled design. Treatment…
Infant‐Mother Attachment at One Year Predicts Children’s Understanding of Mixed Emotions at Six Years
Data from the six‐year follow up of a longitudinal study investigating intergenerational patterns of attachment and the effects of early relationships upon subsequent social, emotional and cognitive development are presented. Around the time of their sixth birthday, 63 children participated in an affect understanding task, involving cartoon diagrams depicting social and emotional dilemmas. As predicted, performance on this task, assessed in terms…
Psychoanalytic Research and the Ipa
This paper traces the chequered history of formal psychoanalytic research within the century-long development of psychoanalysis as theory and practice. It describes the official involvement of the American Psychoanalytic Association in the support of psychoanalytic research since 1970, and of the International Psychoanalytical Association since the 1980s. In the IPA, this has consisted of the introduction at the 1987 Montreal Congress of two half…
Playing With Reality
This paper is a contribution towards understanding the difficulties of severely borderline patients as they are uncovered within the psychoanalytic process. The authors aim to extend a model from previous papers, bringing a developmental perspective to bear on self-representation and self-organisation. This model rests on an understanding of the child's experience of psychic reality in both normal and neurotic people. The authors explore the rele…
Attachment and Borderline Personality Disorder
The author outlines his concept of reflective function or mentalization, which is defined as the capacity to think about mental states in oneself and in others. He presents evidence to suggest that the capacity for reflective awareness in a child's caregiver increases the likelihood of the child's secure attachment, which in turn facilitates the development of mentalization in the child. He proposes that a secure attachment relationship offers th…
Joseph Sandler (1927–1998)
Key words: Education Section, Obituaries
Joseph Sandler (1927‐1998)
Feeling safe in school∗
This paper advances the hypothesis that for a child to feel safe and to learn at school certain psychological conditions must be met. These conditions are described using concepts derived from psychoanalytic research and include; a background of SAFETY and a feeling of WELL BEING derived from a healthy ego with perceptual skills appropriate to the task, a HOLDING environment of adults who can respond appropriately to the child's developmental nee…
The development of psychopathology from infancy to adulthood
A model for the development of this mechanism is offered as well as evidence for it from five areas: (1) the nature of the association of early attachment and later cognitive functioning, (2) accumulating evidence for the association between secure attachment and the facility with which internal states are understood and represented, (3) the limited predictive value of early attachment classification, (4) the studies of the biological functions o…
The Zero‐to‐Three diagnostic classification in an infant mental health clinic
The clinical and practical experiences of a multidisciplinary infant mental health team using the DC: 0–3 Diagnostic Classification system are presented. Using data obtained from clinical in‐depth evaluations of 167 consecutive referred infants, the characteristics and clinical features of this sample of children and parents are examined. The principal issues are children and families' socioeconomic status, number and types of stressors, as well …
Some Complexities in the Relationship of Psychoanalytic Theory to Technique
This paper considers the current fragmentation of psychoanalytic theory as a result of the illusorily close association of practice and theory. The author argues that the politically motivated assertion of a direct connection between theory and practice should be set aside and that practice should be liberated from theory, permitting theory to evolve in the context of radically modified patterns of practice. If theory were decoupled from practice…
Rejoinder to Harold Blum
The author's main disagreement with Harold Blum is over Blum's contention that symptomatic improvement is directly linked to the recovery of memories. The idea that memories are laid down in childhood and preserved until the time of their later recovery flies in the face of what we now understand as the creation of memories by the neurobiological systems underpinning this aspect of mental function. No evidence directly links symptomatic improveme…
Psychology (105 obras) · Developmental psychology (51 obras) · Clinical Psychology (44 obras) · Psychotherapist (41 obras) · Psychiatry (40 obras) · Medicine (39 obras) · Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development (37 obras) · Social Psychology (36 obras) · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications (35 obras) · Mentalization (33 obras)