ABSTRACT
Patients with personality disorder (PD) show a variety of dif®culties in interpersonal relationships. They acknowledge their own desires and intentions, or fail to take others' perspective, and therefore they cannot successfully manage con¯icting interactions. Metacognitive (or mentalizing) dysfunction seems to underlie the social impairments that are typical of PDs (Fonagy et al., 2002; Bateman and Fonagy, 2004; Semerari et al., 2007). The lack of a nuanced mental state understanding makes these patients unable to face subjective psychological suffering, to modulate interpersonal behaviour according to its ever-changing demands and to solve complex psychological problems.
