Top Highlights

• what our patients cannot articulate will tend to be evoked, enacted, or embodied.
• Recall the clinically crucial finding that an adult’s capacity to think about thoughts—metacognition—and to interpret human behavior in terms of underlying mental states—mentalizing—is a better predictor of attachment security and the ability to raise secure children than the remembered facts of that adult’s own attachment history (Fonagy, Steele, ...
• Then the here and now may suddenly feel charged with a quality of liberating timelessness, rather than suffocating permanence.
• For the patient and child alike, the key to the development both of security and mentalizing is the experience of a relationship in which the attachment figure has your mind in mind (Fonagy et al., 2002).
• In short, our mentalizing—along with that of the patient—can allow the patient’s lived experience with the therapist to be gradually integrated into a new, more adaptive, and more coherent narrative.