Mentalization and Its Failure

Source: Pixabay/used with permission

Mentalization occurs in the first year of life under conditions of secure attachment, when the child feels protected and understood by his or her caregiver. The attuned caregiver is able to sense what the infant is feeling, especially in moments of duress, and reflect back to the infant this mental state using face, body and voice.

1. Reflective capacity. This kind of reflective functioning is a way of seeing another from the inside. Peter Fonagy describes mentalization as an imaginative activity that involves perceiving the intentional mental states of another, being able to imagine another person’s feelings, thoughts, wants, and beliefs.

This is similar to what a viewer does when looking at a drawing or painting and re-presenting the image in the mind’s eye. We find our minds through the minds of others, first through our parents. In Fonagy’s elaboration: “What we think of ourselves… is borne of what we were thought about. We scrutinize the minds of others and try to find ourselves within.” Thinking about feelings is part of what helps regulate them. The caregiver mirrors the infant’s mental state, which helps the baby organize the experience of self. Mentalization is a way of capturing the chaos. It bridges islands of thought and helps integrate the infant’s internal world.

2. Marking. Not only does the caregiver reflect back or re-present the emotions of the infant. A secondary aspect of mentalizing is “marking” or highlighting the child’s mental state as if putting it in quotations. Not only is the parent telling something, but in his or her attitude, the parent also says to the child “I am telling you something now.” The mimicry is framed, so to speak. By marking the child’s emotional display, the caregiver is expressing “how I see what you are experiencing."

Consider: If the caregiver fails to mark the expression of the infant’s emotions and responds only by reproducing the same affective state this can provoke and, rather than soothe, lead to an escalation of tension. If for example, the infant is angry and sees the parental responding in kind, screeching back in response to a baby’s wailing, this magnifies emotion rather than organizing and containing it. A parental failure in marked mirroring can trigger distrust and even trauma. In marking, the caregiver highlights the emotion as different from that of the parent’s own. In this way, it helps the infant begin to recognize the difference between what the infant feels and that of the caregiver, between inside and outside.

I recently came across a similar mental activity used as a pedagogical tool in my son’s public high school. Educator Emily Style speaks about the importance of “mirrors and windows.” A fundamental purpose of education, she claims, is to enhance one’s capacity to imagine multiple realities. As she puts it:

"If the student is understood as occupying a dwelling of self, education needs to enable the student to look through window frames in order to see the realities of others and into mirrors in order to see her/his own reality reflected. Knowledge of both types of framing is basic to a balanced education… education engages us in 'the great conversation' between various frames of reference."

Ideally, a student gains a "window" into the lives of those different from self and also looks into a "mirror" in order to see his or her reality reflected in the characters of a book or story.

3. Symbolization. Mentalization is an early expression of the capacity for symbolization. For some disorders, such as borderline personality disorder, the ability to mentalize has not occurred properly. In the borderline condition, one is weakened in the capacity to think about the mental states of others because knowledge of one’s own internal states has not been symbolized or re-presented by the caregiver. The caregiver is neglectful or unavailable emotionally. Perhaps she is the "dead mother" that Andre Green writes about, the depressed maternal figure with empty eyes of stone. Here, there is no bridge between the two minds. The parent is overcome with a loss and mourning of her own and has "switched off" emotional resonance with her child. Over time the infant internalizes this unresponsive emotional core. In other words, the emotionally "dead mother" shapes a disordered attachment and fosters a destructive narcissism within the child.

We have a window into such a state in the literature of Sylvia Plath who fashioned the character, Esther Greenwood, who suffers chronic depression as if her head is confined to an airless bell jar, her mind trapped under a vacuum chamber — a display case distorting perspective and obstructing human connection.

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Another relational circumstance that frustrates the mentalization process is with a caregiver who, more than listening, projects into the child. For the infant, contact with the (m)other is felt as an intrusion, something done to oneself, like a tornado ripping through trees. The child is swept up in the caregiver’s emotional wake. One is invaded and extruded upon.

What then does an infant do with projections when boundaries are porous and ego wobbly? How can the child do anything but take them in: a load of anxiety or fear—or perhaps the image of oneself as a bad object, a bad seed in the making. The child, as a target, identifies with the attribution or may defensively disconnect from receiving mentalizing imagery from the caregiver altogether—in order to distance from cruel contents of the mind. In this context, interpersonal contact is an experience of emotional upheaval and profound misunderstanding. As Christopher Bollas succinctly put it, for the borderline personality, emotional turbulence and fragmentation become the object of desire in interpersonal relationships.

When an infant goes unmentalized and is deprived of this internal experience of organization, he or she is vulnerable to unbinding and splitting off parts of the self. The borderline personality uses projective identification to disown parts of oneself, place them into another and then try to control these unwanted fragments — out there – in the mind and body of someone else. These are collusive dynamics and the projection hits a vulnerability in the person projected onto, who must be willing to believe in and inhabit the projection (“I am weak, inadequate, bad”). Often, two people in a couple find one another in order to fulfill this unconscious dynamic, one person offloading parts of the self for the other who is willing to carry them.

Sometimes a borderline personality presents as someone extremely controlling in order to handle the projection put into another and to counter their own internal chaos. Such controlling tendencies are intolerant of other perspectives with a white-knuckled grip on one reality. This is an attempt to avoid ambivalence and uncertainty. There are no "windows" and "mirrors." The tragedy of the borderline is this quality of being locked-in to one reality and superficial relatedness. A weakened capacity for mentalization is the Achille’s heel of the borderline. What is lost when metaphorical thought goes undeveloped is the freedom to know one’s own mind and that of others, and with it the capacity for intimacy.

4. Concrete thinking. Symbolic thought is a developmental achievement. Humans, among primates, are symbolizing animals. In the absence of mentalization, the experience of oneself and others is concrete and literal, with scant space for multiple meanings. Richard Howard Tuck well describes the concretization that results when one cannot mentalize:

"the concrete thinker… prefers to stick as closely as possible to the narrow meanings denoted by words, fearing he will become hopelessly lost in the hinterlands of connotation and abstraction. Concrete thinking... turns the least tangible aspects of life into ‘things,’ which can then be ‘handled.’ Things are created when labels are applied, thus contributing to the illusion that something is understood when in fact all that has happened is that a handle has been applied. Though the concrete thinker is clueless about the effect this has on his life, such thinking drains the vital juices that saturate the tissue of life experiences with meaning."

A failure in mentalization is a blindness to the difference between a symbol and what is symbolized. I think of René Magritte’s painting, This is not a pipe also called The Treachery of Images, which challenges perceptions of reality and calls attention to the difference between the word or representation and the thing itself.

5. Vulnerability to shame. Finally, without the capacity for mentalization, a person is vulnerable to shame. Shame is more primitive than guilt, which is a developmentally later mental state of feeling bad for having done something wrong. Shame is an emotional encounter with another that destroys self-integrity and leads to fragmentation. Melvin Lansky refers to the experience of shame as a “narcissistic mortification.” Shame involves exposure, the display or revelation of one’s essential deficiency. Shame goes to the core of one's being. The sadistic eyes looking at oneself from within — these are the inward eyes of shame. In Peter Shaffer's play, Equus, an adolescent boy blinds six horses with a steel spike after a shameful sexual encounter with a woman in the stables.

For a person who has not developed the ability to mentalize, an insult is felt like an attack that undermines the fundamental sense of being worthy and lovable. One feels wrong in one’s being. An emotional injury is felt in a way that cuts deep and threatens to destroy the self. There is no distance or the facility to consider that what was said or done is only what another person is thinking or has in mind. The insult is felt in a more literal way, as something real and factual. The person is missing what Fonagy calls, “that protective layer around your mind that mentalization provides… It’s like missing skin, or like after a burn, your epidermis is gone... your nerves are exposed.”

In the absence of mentalization, affect regulation is undermined, so instead of being able to think about feelings, they are often enacted. These are the factors that make a person dangerous and liable to be violent, either emotionally or physically. Lansky points out that often the experience of shame, when it remains hidden or unacknowledged, can rapidly transform into rage. The shame-rage cycle occurs between people and also groups. Lansky goes on to describe how the “vengeful state of mind” transforms a previously weak and vulnerable mental state into one of power, strength, and certainty. Understanding processes of mentalization, and its lapses, offers insight into human destructiveness and repetitive cycles of violence.

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