Campbell, Chloe; Luyten, Patrick; Allison, Elizabeth; Fonagy, Peter; (2024) Mentalizing in infancy and early childhood. In: Fitzgerald, Hiram E and Osofsky, Joy D and Keren, Miri and Puura, Kaija, (eds.) WAIMH handbook of infant and early childhood mental health. (pp. 391-405). Springer: Cham, Switzerland.

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Abstract

This chapter explains the role of mentalizing in infant development, describing how the emergence of an agentive self is associated with the acquisition of the capacity to mentalize. Mentalizing caregivers respond with contingent and marked affective displays of their own experience in response to the child’s subjective experience, thus enabling the child to develop second-order representations of their own subjective experiences. It is further argued that the development of mentalizing also primes the infant to adopt a stance of epistemic trust and openness to cultural learning, one of the foundations of salutogenic social functioning.

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