Mentalization

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MENTALIZATION

The term mentalization is a neologism created to meet the needs of research into psychosomatic phenomena. Used byÉdouard Claparède as early as 1928, the term was adopted by Pierre Marty around 1970. Marty has acknowledged that this concept, which has become an established part of psychoanalytic terminology, was born of the need to establish a psychosomatic classification.

The notion was defined on the basis of a hypothetical impoverishment of the mental functions within the framework of the psychosomatic economy. In both theory and practice, it relates to the representational system, including affective ideation. It covers the quantity and quality of the individual's mental representations, the quality of their articulations, bonds, and networks. Mentalization supports fantasies and dream elements, and facilitates associations and the conversion of internal excitations into thoughts.

In terms of the psychosomatic economy, Marty spoke of inadequacy in acquired ideas, of a lack of availability owing to avoidance or repression, and of mental disorganization; three possible origins, then, all associated with a decreased vigor in mental reality. The first is based on violent or unpleasurable affects linked to perceptual memory traces from a very early time that have not been subjected to the mechanisms of repression; the focus here is on unsymbolizable early traumas, offering a possible structural hypothesis for the process of somatization. The second origin involves conflicts that pit ideas with a heavy instinctual charge against early psychic formations. Their nature being modified by censorship, these ideas are in theory stripped of their original affective value. The third origin is mental disorganization, a crucial concept in Marty's approach.

Mentalization is thus closely bound up with the key elements of the deficiency-oriented paradigm reflected in the notions of operative and essential depression, as well as with the hypothesis of disorganization.

The notion of mentalization has been used to construct a nosological framework, whence such characterizations as "good mentalization," "poor mentalization," and "uncertain mentalization," as well as that "irregularity in mental function" said to play a role in the so-called character neuroses.

Alain Fine

See also: Character; Character neurosis; Marty, Pierre; Preconscious, the; Psychoanalytic semiology; Stranger; Symptom-formation; Work (as a psychoanalytic notion).