Yale and New York, thoughts on Mentalization...

Honoured, excited and not a litle over-awed to be in a golden-leafed Yale this week, for a conference on mentalization based treatments for children and families, in which I am speaking about AMBIT and running a training with Efrain Bleiberg on MBT-F. Next week I go down to New York, where I am talking at the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatrists annual conference about Mentalization - as part of Efrain's symposium; how it arises and why it is particularly challenged in Adolescence.

Thanks to our grants (see earlier post)the AMBIT project is gearing up for a growth spurt. As a coda, I realise that the preceding sentence contains an appalling bit of metaphor-mixing; images of heavy machinery (gears) alongside biological processes (growth) - hmmm, a metaphor within a metaphor, perhaps. I increasingly see one of the bonuses of Mentalization as being a concept that can help lubricate the existing 'heavy machinery' of evidence-based therapies (CBT, Psychodynamic approaches, Family work, etc) by helping them to rub alongside each other, encouraging what Peter Fuggle has called 'cross -border trade'. One of the interesting phenomena that we have seen is that the concept of mentalization, or M-B therapies themselves have been claimed as 'coherent with' or indeed 'plagiarised from' (!) a range of older and distinguished therapeutic and theoretical models, ones that, between themselves have often offered a rather unedifying spectacle of internecine strife ('last man standing wins'). Mentalizing, perhaps by being at least inoffensive to most, offers soemthing approaching a common language that neurosciences, cognitive-behaviourist, systems and psychoanalytic practitioners can sign up to. If I am right, that is real progress.

I hope to see progress for AMBIT in the coming months, with migration of the AMBIT and MBT-F manuals from Tiddlyspot and Tiddlyweb to the TiddlySpace site (I will put automatic forwarding and/or links into the orginal sites) - when this occurs it will become much easier for local services to incorporate this 'core' material in their own manual variants... allow for glitches and please support the brave few services that try this to start with...!