Mentalizing: Holding the Mind In Mind

Explaining.

Dr. Owen Muir is one of a handful of official MBT supervisors in North America in mentalization.

He's also the co-editor of Adolescent Suicide and Self Injury: a Mentalization-Based Treatment Approach. This article is a lesson, more or less.

I am a medical doctor, and I went to med school to learn how to use medicines because I thought, wow, this is going to be great. I'm going to fix all my patients’ problems. And it turned out… not to be the case.

When mentalization-based treatment came into my life, I realized I had this whole other realm of tools in really specific psychotherapies that weren't being broadly utilized in the U. S. I thought, “I guess I'm going to have to get good at this because no one else seems to be doing it.”

My favorite teacher in medical school, Jeffrey Lyness, taught us, when you lecture:

“tell them what you're going to tell them,

Tell them,

and then tell them what you told them.”

The first thing we will do is define a very wonky word: mentalization.

We have to defi…