Peter Fonagy

Peter Fonagy
Born 1952
Budapest, Hungary
Residence London, England
Fields Psychoanalysis, psychiatry
Institutions Freud Memorial Professor of Psychoanalysis and Head of the Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology at University College London, Chief Executive at the Anna Freud Centre in London, Consultant to the Child and Family Program at the Menninger Department of Psychiatry, Baylor College of Medicine.

Peter Fonagy OBE FMedSci FBA (born 1952) is a Hungarian-born British psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist. He studied clinical psychology at University College London. He is Freud Memorial Professor of Psychoanalysis and head of the department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology at University College London, Chief Executive of the Anna Freud Centre, a training and supervising analyst in the British Psycho-Analytical Society in child and adult analysis, a Fellow of the British Academy, the Faculty of Medical Sciences and a registrant of the BPC. His clinical interests centre on issues of borderline psychopathology, violence and early attachment relationships. His work attempts to integrate empirical research with psychoanalytic theory. He has published numerous articles and has authored or edited 16 books.[1]

Fonagy was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2013 Birthday Honours for services to psychoanalysis and clinical psychology. and received the Wiley Prize of the British Academy for Lifetime Achievements [2]

Contemporary psychoanalysis

Fonagy received the Otto Weininger Memorial Award[3] for his contributions to the development of contemporary psychoanalysis. To this regard he has helped to improve the dialogue between analysts and cognitive therapists. Fonagy has played and still plays a major role in the evaluation of psychotherapy research.[4] The evaluation of his research is (mostly) based on the effectiveness of treatment. Evaluation of treatment has led to review, recommendations and implications of psychotherapy. Fonagy has offered detailed evidence for the efficacy of psychological interventions of mental disorders and for special populations, including treatment of borderline personality disorder.

Mentalization

In their award winning[5] book Affect Regulation, Mentalisation and the Development of the Self, Fonagy and his colleagues put forth a detailed theory for the way in which the abilities to mentalise and to regulate affect can determine an individual's successful development. They define mentalisation as the ability to make and use mental representations of their own and other people's emotional states. The authors discuss the ways in which bad and insufficient parenting, leading to certain attachment styles,[6] can leave children unable to modulate and interpret their own feelings, as well as the feelings of others.[7] These inabilities to mentalise and regulate affect have implications for severe personality disorders, as well as general psychological problems of self-confidence, and sense of self.[8]

Mentalization-based treatment

Fonagy is particularly interested in borderline personality disorder, which was for a long time assumed to be treatment-resistant.[9] He and A. Bateman proposed in their book Psychotherapy for borderline personality disorder: mentalisation based treatment, a new way to treat BPD.[10] Mentalization based treatment (MBT), rooted in attachment theory, is based on the idea that people with borderline personality disorder mainly lack the ability to mentalise, which is caused by an absence of contingent and marked mirroring during development. The primary goals of treatment are to improve mentalisation skills, making connections between the inner experience of relationships and the actual representation, learning how to work with current emotions and how to establish real relationships. In this way they could form a more coherent sense of self and develop new (secure) attachment styles.[11][12]

Works

References

  1. ↑ "Peter Fonagy". UCL Psychoanalysis Unit.
  2. ↑ The London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 60534. p. 10. 15 June 2013.
  3. ↑ "Otto Weininger Memorial Award". Canadian Psychological Association.
  4. ↑ Fonagy 1996.
  5. ↑ "Goethe Award for Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Scholarship". Canadian Psychological Association.
  6. ↑ Mills, Jon (2005). Treating Attachment Pathology. Aronson/Rowman & Littlefield. p. 231. ISBN 978-0-7657-0132-9.
  7. ↑ Fonagy et al. 2002.
  8. ↑ Fonagy & Target 2006a.
  9. ↑ Bateman & Fonagy 2003b.
  10. ↑ Fonagy & Bateman 2004b.
  11. ↑ Bateman & Fonagy 2004a.
  12. ↑ Fonagy & Bateman 2006b.
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Wednesday, April 06, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.