2024 Reiss-Greenberg Chair

Arietta Slade, PhD: Parental mentalizing refers to the parents' capacity to imagine and be curious about what's going on inside the child's mind. And, you know, oftentimes in the most complicated clinical situations, what we're seeing is parents who really are having difficulty with this. And one of the ways that I think about parent work is that you're really helping developing these capacities in parents. Forming a relationship with the child is often the easiest thing that we do. It's actually meeting the parents, helping establish safety. The clinical situation where you're bringing your child in for treatment is not inherently safe. And as a function of the fact that it's a potentially dangerous moment and one that's potentially full of humiliation and shame, it's a moment where trust is absolutely critical. But when parents feel threatened and are disregulated or threatened and are highly defended, then that's the place we really need to start as clinicians; that mentalizing grows out of a relationship, it grows out of trusting another person. The parent-child relationship, regardless of many of these other aspects, is absolutely key, and it does protect children. When that relationship is solid, and when that feeling of safety and mattering to somebody is solid, that makes up for an awful lot of difficulties. But parental mentalizing really depends on your being able to stop and think and stop and feel. Don't just do something, stand there and pay attention. Your child is trying to tell you something. And a reflective stance of mentalizing parents says, "what is that something?" Working with the parents to really begin taking a mentalizing stance in relation to the child is I think absolutely critical.