Parental Mentalising: storying the inner life of self and child

Chapter 4 explores the contribution to understanding caregiving offered by concept of Reflective Functioning, also called mentalising. This is the human capacity to interpret the behaviour of oneself and others as the result of internal processes and motivations. Mentalising exerts a critical influence on the development of the child’s sense of self, social relationships, and through the repair of ruptures, the developing attachment relationship. The hyper-activation of caregiving inherent in Controlling caregiving, is facilitated by a tendency towards ‘psychic equivalence’. This is a tendency to invest images and descriptions of the outside world with the parent’s own internal feelings of anger and fear; reading an internal experience of threat into the external environment. The hypo-activation of caregiving inherent in Unresponsive caregiving is often facilitated by a ‘pretend mode’, where the parent’s descriptions of their inner experience are imported from the outside, uncoupled from, and excluding attention towards, any anger, fear and distress they may be feeling, to avoid being overwhelmed. Teleological reasoning refers to a pre-mentalising state where mentalising language concretises an internal process as external objects and mechanical processes. The implications of these states for understanding parenting and parental discourse are discussed, with examples.