Behind the closed doors of mentalizing. A commentary on “Another step closer to measuring the ghosts in the nursery: preliminary validation of the Trauma Reflective Functioning Scale”

Citation: Schimmenti A (2015) Behind the closed doors of mentalizing. A commentary on " Another step closer to measuring the ghosts in the nursery: preliminary validation of the Trauma Reflective Functioning Scale. " Front. Psychol. 6:380. A commentary on Another step closer to measuring the ghosts in the nursery: preliminary validation of the trauma reflective functioning scale In his Clinical Diary, Ferenczi (1932/1988) suggested that an organizing life instinct allows the individual to survive child abuse. He called this instinct Orpha, and described it as a guardian angel who anesthetizes " the consciousness and sensitivity against sensations as they become unbearable " (p. 9). Ferenczi argued that a fragmentation however occurs in personality as a consequence of the abuse: the personality is split into a " capable part " as a " regulated mechanism " dealing with daily life and activities, secret parts that struggle in despair because they experience " the fire of suffering, " and another part containing " this suffering itself as a separate mass of affect, without contents and unconscious, the remains of the actual person " (p. 10). Ferenczi's concept of Orpha tends to correspond to our current understanding of dissociation. In fact, child abuse and neglect (CA&N) in the context of attachment relationship can generate a severe impairment in the individual's ability to integrate mental states and their related affective contents into a consistent structure of meaning (Allen, 2013). The psychological cost of dissocia-tion is high: dissociation may involve either a loss of continuity in subjective experience, and/or an inability to access information or control mental functions, and/or a sense of experiential discon-nectedness (Cardeña and Carlson, 2011). How do these considerations relate to the " ghosts in the nursery " (Fraiberg et al., 1975), the haunting internal presences that lead parents to re-enact their own traumatic past by victimizing their child? In a recent study, Ensink et al. (2014) investigated how mentalization (measured as reflective functioning, RF) was related to investment in pregnancy and couple functioning among 100 pregnant women who suffered from CA&N. The researchers analyzed the Adult Attachment Interview protocols (AAI) of these women, and applied distinct RF scores to the relationship with attachment figures (RF-G) and to the traumatic experiences (RF-T). Ensink and colleagues found that RF-T was significantly lower than RF-G among the participants , thus they suggested that women with histories of CA&N do not manifest a generic inhibition …