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In 2004, with the publication of Bateman and Fonagy’s book, Mentalization-based Therapy for Borderline Personality Disorder, a wonderful bridge between theoretical integration and clinical reality began to emerge. While Bateman and Fonagy’s (2004) therapeutic model represented an invaluable contribution to the field of personality disorders and continues to be, it also opened the door to what has become a fruitful field of research and clinical development. Today, one only needs to search mentalization on the web and witness the international reach of these ideas and how they have captured the imagination and creativity of clinicians, theoreticians, and researchers all over the world. In 2017, an example of such impact was the publication of the book, Mentalization-based Treatment for Children – A time limited approach, by an international group of authors (Midgley et al., 2017). The book brought together the strengths of researchers and clinicians alike resulting in a developmental and relational model of intervention. In the same vein, there have been developmental and systemic modifications and applications of the original model, including work with adolescents and families among many other adaptations to the needs of specific populations such as chronic illness, relational trauma, sexual abuse, and maltreatment, eating disorders, conduct disorders, working with parents, to mention a few.
In June 2023, MBT researchers and clinicians gathered in the city of Barcelona to celebrate the first International MBT conference with a focus on children, adolescents, and families. The conference sought to create dialogs between research and clinical practice, attempting to highlight the strength of this contemporary psychodynamic model which brings together developmental psychology, child psychoanalysis, neuroscience, systemic and relational lenses as well as anthropology and developmental psychopathology frameworks. The conference highlighted the richness of the mentalizatio