While the broader concept of theory of mind has been explored at least since Descartes, the specific term 'mentalization' emerged in psychoanalytic literature in the late 1960s, and became empirically tested in 1983 when Heinz Wimmer and Josef Perner[5] ran the first experiment to investigate when children can understand false belief, inspired by Daniel Dennett's interpretation of a Punch and Judy scene.
The field diversified in the early 1990s when Simon Baron-Cohen and Uta Frith, building on the Wimmer and Perner study, and others merged it with research on the psychological and biological mechanisms underlying autism and schizophrenia.
Concomitantly, Peter Fonagy and colleagues applied it to developmental psychopathology in the context of attachment relationships gone awry.
[6] More recently, several child mental health researchers such as Arietta Slade,[7] John Grienenberger,[8] Alicia Lieberman,[9] Daniel Schechter,[10] and Susan Coates[11] have applied mentalization both to research on parenting and to clinical interventions with parents, infants, and young children.
According to Peter Fonagy, individuals with disorganized attachment style (e.g., due to physical, psychological, or sexual abuse) can have greater difficulty developing the ability to mentalize.
Securely attached individuals tend to have had a primary caregiver that has more complex and sophisticated mentalizing abilities.