Minding the Child: Mentalization-Based Interventions with Children, Young People and their Families. (2012). Nick Midgley & Ioanna Vrouva (Eds.): London, England: Routledge. $37.95

This slender volume is both an introduction to the concept of mentalization and a survey of selected current interventions that focus on this basic human capacity and how it can become derailed. The idea for the book was inspired by two conferences that took place in 2010, one at the Anna Freud Centre in London and the second at the Yale Child Study Centre in New Haven, Connecticut. The authors represent an international forum drawing from clinical venues in several countries including the United States, Britain, Holland, Greece, and Scandanavia.†

Nick Midgely is Director of Programme for the MSc in Developmental Psychology and Clinical Practice at the Anna Freud Centre/University College London. Ioanna Vrouva is a Trainee Clinical Psychologist at the University College London, where she received her PhD. In their introductory remarks, they cite Fonagy's definition of mentalization as “a form of imaginative mental activity, namely, perceiving and interpreting human behavior in terms of intentional mental states” (Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist, & Target, 2002). The authors claim that over the last 20 years, this concept has come increasingly to be recognized as a fundamental component of what it means to be human.

Midgley and Vrouva emphasize the central role mentalization plays in affect regulation and the development of a coherent sense of self. They suggest the developmental processes operationalized in the concept of mentalization are central to a variety of clinical interventions. By applying the concept of mentalization, clinical data can be connected to measurable and reliable outcomes, expanding the basis of evidence for the consensual understanding of psychodynamic