Mentalizing − During Individual Therapy and Shared Briefings and Debriefings

In Cornerstone classes, education includes benevolent loving, attuning with, coaxing, introducing and cautiously intriguing the child into the world of words, verbalized thoughts and abstractions.

Through the psychotherapist’s thousands of moments of shared patter over the course of a child’s preschool year, we are inducing changes in a developmentally valuable process.  Because the therapist is always turning the child’s actions and play into words (a constant process in Cornerstone) the treatment encourages a developmental shift from behavior into thought expressed as semantic abstractions.  This is called “mentalizing” (Fonagy 1995).  Mentalizing, which is developmentally and adaptively light years more advanced than action, provides a child’s mind with speedier thought and data processing abilities.

Rather than only behaving about a topic (such as missing Mommy, expressed as angrily breaking loved toys in the classroom when his mother leaves), a child can now think about that topic. A dialogue can evolve with a therapist over several minutes and over many cumulative hours of regular 15-20 minute sessions of mentalizing during which the therapist describes the child’s anger, jealousy, greed, longings or other affectively charged processes almost immediately to the child, as close as possible to the moment it happens, and before the child has forgotten the emotions involved.  

The teacher and the therapist mentalize in their communications to the child during briefings and debriefings (see Method section) which multiplies opportunities for modeling mentalizing while the child participates in shared reflections.