You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Psychological mindedness (PM) is a psychoanalytic personality construct that implies awareness and understanding of mental life. The psychologically minded person identifies, labels, and constructively
organizes thoughts and feelings as perceived in self and in others. As a psychological explanatory style, PM draws on these thoughts and feelings to account for behavior (e.g., “I did it because I was angry”). This style stands in sharp contrast to a biological explanatory style in which a person explains his or her actions based on biological mechanisms (“I did it because I have a chemical imbalance)” or a religious conception (“The devil made me do it”).
The construct of PM has been used in clinical settings to select patients for psychodynamic therapy. PM has also been seen as a desirable quality in psychotherapists and psychotherapy trainees. The clinical importance of PM has been supported in several empirical studies of psychotherapy process and outcome: high PM patients are more engaged in the treatment process and receive greater benef its from psychodynamically informed psychotherapy (Conte and Ratto 1997; McCallum and Piper 1997).
In her review of the diverse literature on PM, Hall (1992) noted that theorists tend to conceptualize the construct along two dimensions—either as an interest or as an ability—and targeting either affect or cognition. Of course, PM may be applied to self or to others (Farber 1985). The Hall model represents a great advance in the theory of PM. However, we found that the model does not explicitly distinguish between awareness of psychological experience (e.g., “I am aware that I am angry”) and understanding of that experience (“I am angry because my manuscript was rejected”). Therefore, we sought to create a comprehensive model of PM by adding a third dimension that explicitly captures the distinction between psychological awareness and understanding.
We hope that this structural model will guide the theory and measu