#peter fonagy

Affect Regulation, Mentalization and the Development of the Self (Peter Fonagy, 2002)

“Building on Piaget's concept of reversibility, A. E. Thompson considers affect "irreversible" when the child cannot imagine other reactions to the object, or feelings other than the one he currently feels.

Reversibility gradually emerges between middle childhood and early adolescence.

Slowly the child wonders what it might take not to feel as he does, or to change the feeling state of the object.

With formal operations fully deployed, the child begins to think of general principles rather than aspects of the specific situation that can explain or change emotions.

However, while advances in the capacity for abstract thought enable the adolescent to take a step back and to monitor himself and others, this does not necessarily feel like a good thing.

For the adolescent, as experiencer of affect in himself and others, the world is suddenly much more complicated and confusing.

Thus, he needs at times to withdraw from interactions, or from mentalization in general, to take a rest from the ramifications of alternative motivations. (…)

Some adolescents may engage in arcade games, surfing the Internet, and so on;

Founded by Anthony Bateman and Peter Fonagy MBT is a type of psychotherapy specifically aimed to treat individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder, a link to a previous post explaining this disorder will be at the bottom, I recommend checking that out beforehand for context. 

Typically, individuals with BPD struggle with impulsive behaviour, unstable realisation and the ability to realise the impact their actions may have on themselves and others as well as recognising faulty thinking patterns. Therefore, MBT aims to tackle this by better enabling individuals to better understand their thinking patterns, their emotions and how to empathise with others, thus giving them better mentalization (in short).

Mentalization is referred to as being the ability to understand our emotions and behaviour and how they can relate to the mental states in ourselves and others. MBT aims to achieve this by equipping its patients with the skills to take a pause when encountering a strong feeling or a difficult situation, and taking time to evaluate the situation and think about their reaction. 

MBT is largely based on attachment theory. Individuals with BPD are believed to have an insecure disorganised attachment type (where they jump between wanting love and comfort and avoiding it). Adopting a better capacity to mentalize would enable these individuals to regulate their behaviour and balance our their own emotions rather than it impacting their relationships.

This therapist will encourage their client to recall recent events that have occurred in their lives and to reflect on them- what they thought, how they felt, how they reacted. Vocalising this will enable the client to better understand how their mind works, and where they may be having unhelpful thoughts that are not based on rationality- this way, they can better evaluate when they make misjudgements. This can also be done in group therapy where individuals will share a scenario in their own lives that they may have reacted to in an undesirable manner, they will then be able to understand their emotions and what caused them to feel that way, uncovering repressed feelings. If the individual is having trouble mentalizing the group can help to provide a rational explanation for the feeling, helping both the individual and the rest of the group to evaluate their own minds. 

Affect Regulation, Mentalization and the Development of the Self (Peter Fonagy, 2002)

“It is important not to conflate reflective function with introspection. (…)

Reflective function, referred to in developmental psychology as "theory of mind,"

is the developmental acquisition that permits children to respond not only to another person's behavior,

but to the children's conception of others' beliefs, feelings, attitudes, desires, hopes, knowledge, imagination, pretense, deceit, intentions, plans, and so on.

Reflective function, or mentalization, enables children to "read" other people's minds. (…)

In our view, the caregiver facilitates the creation of mentalizing models through complex linguistic and quasi-linguistic processes,

primarily by behaving toward the child in such a way that the child is eventually led to postulate that his own behavior may be best understood if he assumes that he has ideas and beliefs, feelings and wishes,

that determine his actions, and the reactions of others to him can then be generalized to other similar beings. (…)

Naturally the absence of reflective function in such situations will give the appearance of rigidity to the person's behavior, as if only a singular pattern of response were accessible.

Furthermore, the response may frequently be in conflict with social norms because the tendency to take the perspective of others has been abandoned in that context,

and consequently the "moral emotions" used to make judgments about the consequences of actions and to regulate behavior are absent.

The absence of reflective function may further exaggerate an antisocial response by forcing the individual to see the other not as another intentional agent,

MBTI & Ideas

“She thinks of me as thinking and therefore I exist as a thinker”

“The securely attached child perceives in the caregiver’s reflective stance an image of himself as desiring and believing.

He sees that the caregiver represents him as an intentional being, and this representation is internalized to form the self.

“I think, therefore I am” will not do as a psychological model of the birth of the self; “She thinks of me as thinking and therefore I exist as a thinker” perhaps comes closer to the truth.”

“the self-representation will be the representation of another”

“Maltreatment and difficulty in mentalizing preclude such an organic self-image.

Internal experience is not met by external understanding; it remains unlabeled and confusing, and the uncontained affect generates further dysregulation. (...)

Therefore, representation in the case of unresponsive parenting will be less meaningfully integrated and less symbolically bound.

In place of an image corresponding to the constitutional self, the self-representation will be the representation of another.

In the case of some maltreated children, this is not a neutral other but rather a torturing one.

Once internalized and lodged within the self-representation, this alien representation has to be expelled, not only because it does not match the constitutional self, but also because it is persecutory.

The consequences for affect regulation are then disastrous.”

Sources: video, text: Fonagy, Peter, Mary Target, and George Gergely. "Attachment and borderline personality disorder." Psychiatric Clinics 23.1 (2000): 103-122.

See also: Kelly McGonigal 

Fonagy, Peter, and Patrick Luyten. "A developmental, mentalization-based approach to the understanding and treatment of borderline personality disorder." Development and psychopathology 21.4 (2009): 1355-1381.

“This suggests that a fundamental process that allows us to appreciate the actions and emotions of others involves the activation of the mirror neuron system for actions and the activation of visceromotor centers for the understanding of affect.

This is thought to be one of the key evolutionary mechanisms underpinning social empathy: knowing from the inside how someone else feels.

This is an implicit, automatic system, providing physical other to self and self to other mapping, which is involved in the immediate understanding (or misunderstanding) of self and others.”

——

“Developmentally we have tended to assume a state of egocentrism in children; that is, that they are limited to interpreting the world from their own point of view.

However, motor neuron findings suggest the opposite; that is, that infants have to develop the capacity to learn what is “me” as distinguished from states of mind assumed to be shared by others. (...)

The sharing of structures not only implies a model for acquisition but also highlights the potential for conflating the embodied simulation of another person’s experience with one’s own experience.”

——

“To anticipate later considerations concerning the emergence of BPD slightly, we might hypothesize that the failure of medial prefrontal and temporoparietal mentalizing function in the course of development

might leave the individual with difficulties in decoupling their representations of another person’s experience from their self-representations.

Being part of it could 'in a small way benefit the welfare of generations, and generations of this country and beyond', he added.