ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how the patient's distant relational past may have led to the characteristic patterns in her current interpersonal interactions and reviews the role that one particular social factor, attachment, may have in the development of adult psychopathology. The earliest experiences of attachment shape the patient's current style of interpersonal interactions and contribute to equipping the individual with an intrapsychic mental mechanism for understanding the interpersonal world: the capacity to mentalize. The chapter explores potential links between the Interpersonal Dynamics (ID) consultation and attachment styles and components of mentalization in terms of the demands this approach makes on the capacity of the patient and staff to mentalize. The ID consultation offers clinicians and teams a way of developing a shared understanding of the characteristic interpersonal interactions of their patients. It draws heavily on Benjamin's Structural Analysis of Social Behaviour (SASB), a method of describing and analysing interpersonal interactions.
