In the description there’s a link to an essay I’ve written about empathy, the latest findings in the field.

Now, empathy aside, how do we read the minds of other people?

Empathy is very misleading because it is utterly internal.

So what we tend to do with empathy, we tend to project our internal environment on someone else.

Of course, we get it wrong most of the time.

The way there are studies that show that the higher your level of empathy, the less well you read other people.

Yes, you heard me correctly. The more empathy you have, the less well you’re attuned to other people.

So empathy, because it’s internal, because it’s a projection, because it’s about you, it is you less capable to truly read the minds of other people.

So how do we manage?

How do we manage to read the minds of other people?

There are several processes involved and I’m going to dwell on each and every one of them.

First one is known as intersubjectivity.

Intersubjectivity is the shared perception of reality between two or more individuals.

Of course, it presupposes that we as human beings can have direct knowledge of reality except through our senses, sight, hearing, smell, taste, tactile feeling, etc.

So there is this hidden assumption that through this agreement between humans, between human beings, through this agreement we can somehow learn about reality or at the very least the reality of someone else, which is of course utterly nonsensical.

We have no access to anyone else’s mind.

We have to rely 100% on self-reporting and comparisons with past events and our own experience.

It’s all speculative, it’s all interpolation and extrapolation.

It’s all, there’s nothing objective about it, nothing positivistic, nothing scientific.

So intersubjectivity is an agreement to delude ourselves and to deceive ourselves into the belief that we have so much in common with other people that we can make safe bets and assumptions about their states of mind, not regarding or apart from their own self-reporting.

We can put aside what they tell us about themselves and we can guess accurately what’s really happening, what’s the real state of mind, that is, intersubjectivity.

Each individual’s reality is necessarily subjective.

It’s of course impossible for us to know how someone else perceives the world or even experiences the color red.

We can agree that a certain frequency of light is red, but how do we experience it?

What does love mean to you or to me or to a third party?

When we use language we make the assumption that we are referring, we are signaling the same thing, but of course we never are.

It’s all a lie. It’s all a lie.

But people still keep assuming that the world and social interactions follow rules and that these rules are somehow like the laws of physics.

They are outside the control or the manipulative ability of any one person or group of people, which is also untrue.

Yet intersubjectivity is useful in reading other people’s minds because other people are making exactly the same assumptions.

Because there is a consensus about the assumptions, this homogenizes states of minds and behavior.

Technically, intersubjectivity teaches us nothing about the true state of mind of any other person whatsoever.

But the very existence of an intersubjective consensus or agreement causes all of us to conform to the intersubjective consensus or agreement.

It is intersubjectivity that renders us the same. It’s not that it is valid because we are the same. It makes us the same.

And the intersubjective agreement or consensus allows us to coordinate our activities in the expectation that other people share the same agreement and therefore the same welt und schaal, the same view of the world about what is, for example, normal, what is acceptable, what is right, what is healthy, what is expected.

And so intersubjectivity is a contradiction in terms and oxymoron in a way because there’s a problem there.

There’s a problem to study how people view their world. Neither subjectivity nor objectivity is sufficient to explain the life experiences of any single individual.

It is just artificially imposed on us by the very intersubjective agreement.

We say, for example, he thinks like me or let us assume that he thinks like me. And therefore he’s likely to behave this way.

And similarly, your counterparty is thinking the very same.

And so you will end up really acting the way you have expected.

Sociologists study intersubjectivity as an intermediate position that people use to navigate the inaccessibility of other people’s minds.

And in the process of intersubjectivity, we need to visualize other people’s worlds, other people’s realities and other people’s minds.

And this is done by a process called mentalization.

Mentalization is very, very akin to scientific investigation. It actually is a theory about other people. And it’s known as a theory of mind.

Mentalization is the ability to understand one’s own and other people’s mental states.

So people who have no access and no insight to their own psychology cannot effectively mentalize, cannot effectively visualize other people’s minds, which would explain why in many mental illnesses and disorders there’s a problem to interact with other people because you can’t somehow figure them out.

There’s aphantasia of other people.

And so mentalization is a hallmark and a marker, a psycho-barker of truth and reality and above all mental health.

So when you comprehend your own state of mind, you can then somehow infer other people’s intentions, effects, emotions and even cognitions.

This ability, as I said, is the component of healthy personality development. It’s achieved through a secure attachment to the parent.

What’s the connection between mentalization and a secure attachment or a secure base?

Well, if your mother is capricious, arbitrary, unpredictable, threatening, inaccessible, because she’s depressed or narcissistic or what have you, then you are either not able to mentalize her, you’re either unable to mentalize her or you are too afraid to mentalize her.

If your mother doesn’t regard you as a separate entity, doesn’t allow you to develop boundaries and separate an individual from her, how would you ever be able to mentalize anyone?

Mentalization is an integral skill acquired during individuation.

If you’re not allowed to separate an individual, you will never be able to mentalize.

So you need good enough parenting, good enough mother in Winnicott’s terms and not a dead mother in Andrea Green’s terms.

The concept of mentalization is applicable to the understanding and treatment of several mental health disorders and most notably borderline personality disorder.

It’s a disorder that is marked also by the inability to mentalize because of poor attachment in early life.

Same goes for narcissistic personality disorder. These people are not able to see other people as separate from them. They internalize external objects as the narcissist does or they merge and fuse with an external object as the borderline attempts to do.

And then if you become one with another person, you can’t mentalize that other person. You can’t visualize that other person’s state of mind because it will have become your state of mind.

Similarly, if you internalize an external object and it becomes a figment of your own imagination and an introject in the garden or the orchard of your mind, then of course this internal object wouldn’t have a state of mind and there’s no need or ability to mentalize it.

Mentalization– based treatment, MBT, is a psychotherapy. It was developed to address exactly these problems, mentalization deficits.

Initially in patients with borderline personality disorder. MBT attempted to mitigate these deficits, to decrease the problems with mentalization because you see, once you are able to mentalize, once you’re able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and no, this is not empathy. This is constructing a scientific theory or a pseudo scientific theory or a quasi scientific theory about another person and then testing this theory, falsifying it, approving it, making predictions and waiting to see if they come true.

So once you’ve accomplished this, a plethora of other problems are solved, impulse control, affect regulation and so on and so forth, suddenly become much better.

It’s the minute you see other people, you really see them. It’s very difficult for you, for example, to impulsively hurt them.

Your own emotions are much more regulated because you feel much safer, your anxiety is reduced.

Now mentalization was first what was called reflective functioning.

The famous Hungarian born British psychoanalyst, Peter Fonagy, proposed this term in 1996.

It’s a very interesting term because it contains two elements, reflection, the ability to reflect yourself into another person’s gaze and see yourself reflected in that gaze, thereby realizing his separateness and your separateness.

So reflection and functioning.

Mentalization is a precondition for function.

The theory of mind is actually a branch of cognitive science and it investigates how we ascribe the mental states to other people and how we use this knowledge or speculation to explain and predict the actions of other people.

Theory of mind is a branch of cognitive science that investigates essentially mind reading, this mentalizing or mentalistic abilities, its capacity to read other people’s minds.

The accuracy of mind reading is debatable. Whether it’s utterly fantastic or delusional is an open question, but that in mentalization we engage in a deliberate attempt to read other people’s minds is indisputable.

We use the information that we glean or we think we glean to actually function. And these skills are shown by all humans beyond a certain age.

Now, mentalization, I mentioned MBT, the mentalization base there, takes into account the fact that other people are like barriers or containers of psychological states and processes which are unobservable.

Of course, even here it’s contentious because how do you know that someone else has psychological states? How do you know that there are processes going on in someone else’s mind? What about someone in a vegetative state or coma? What about someone who is unconscious? What about someone who is asleep?

It’s very, very wild and daring and grandiose assumption to say, “I am absolutely sure that this person that I’m looking at right now has at this very split second going on inside him internal processes and psychological states.” It’s a very outlier assumption because we can’t prove it.

There’s no way to prove it.

Maybe it’s an android from the future. Maybe it’s a robot escape from a laboratory together with another virus.

I mean, what do we know? We don’t know anything. We don’t know anything. We just see the facade.

How about people with dementia, Cossackoff syndrome, psychotic states? What can we really say about them?

Do they have states of mind? How can you have a state of mind if your memory is never longer than five minutes or 30 seconds in many cases?

It’s not that simple.

When we make these assumptions that other people are like us, so they have processes and thoughts and ideas and fears and cognitions and emotions, it’s just an obstruction.

It helps us to anticipate and to explain other people’s behavior in terms of these states and processes.

In other words, internal processes and mental states are not real. They are language elements.

We process language through them and then create a theory which yields predictions.

These mentalistic abilities are therefore not a part of rigorous psychology. They are known as folk psychology or naive psychology or intuitive psychology, depending on the discipline.

A theory of mind is, to start with, not a very cogent and appropriate term to characterize the whole area, our mentalistic, alleged mentalistic abilities.

Because ab initio, we assume the validity of a specific account of the nature and development of mind-reading.

The view that it depends on the deployment of a theory of mental states, like theories of the physical world.

But a theory of the mind can never be a theory of the physical world. The mind is not a physical entity and can never be reduced to a physical entity.

Watch my other videos. Then psychology will never be a science and its pretensions to science render it a pseudoscience.

This is a subject matter. It’s inaccessible.

Subject matter is mutable. The subject matter cannot be studied rigorously. Results cannot be replicated.

There’s a replication, a gigantic replication crisis in psychology.

Not because scholars are falsifying or researchers are falsifying results, but because the subject matter can never be the same.

So this view, known as theory theory, that we can construct a theory which will be as valid as a theory of physics, and I am a physicist.

So I mock and deride this kind of approach.

But okay, this theory theory approach is only one of the accounts.

We can think of another way of discussing mind reading or tackling mind reading.

How about mental simulation?

Imagine that what we’re doing is modeling, creating models, or creating simulations of other minds inside our mind.

Imagine that you can conceive of our mind as a giant simulator, and we use the mind as an analog model of the mind of the simulated other.

So we simulate the other inside our minds.

It’s another approach to mentalization.

And indeed, in the 60s and 70s, the British object relations schools, later followed by attachment theories, more or less came to the same conclusion that we are somehow simulating the world and everyone in it inside our minds, and then interact with this simulation as if it were real or at least as if it were valid, can provide us with some useful tools and insights.

This is not very different to narcissism.

Let’s see what the narcissist does.

The narcissist snapshots you, takes a snapshot of you, introjects you, simulates you in his mind, continues to interact with the simulation.

There are major differences between mentalization as simulation and narcissism as simulation, but it does involve healthy narcissism.

So if we go a step further, we could say that we’re simulating the entire world and everyone in it.

And this is known as the internal working model of attachment.

According to Bowlby, an internal working model is a mental representation of our relationships with someone, initially with a primary caregiver or primary object, the mother.

And this model, this model, this representation of the relationship becomes a template and all future relationships have to fit into this procrustean bed.

They’re shoehorned into this model.

And this template allows individuals to predict, to control and manipulate the human environment.

So this is Bowlby.

We’re talking simulation.

It’s a central premise of attachment theory.

Bowlby said, and others continued afterwards, watch my videos on attachment theories, Bowlby said that infants learn about ways to relate to other people, ways of relating to other people.

And they learn, they acquire these skills, these skills to have relationships from early interactions with attachment objects.

So the child builds up a set of expectations about himself and himself in relation to others.

On the basis of these first experiences, babies build what Bowlby called an internal working model.

They approach new situations with a prior idea about how they can cope in the face of threat or avoidance or hurt, pain and so on.

Internal working model tells them, informs them what to expect and how to cope with the unexpected.

And this model has three elements according to Bowlby.

It includes the self, it includes the other and it includes the relationship between the self and the other.

I refer you to work by Bretherton as well as Bowlby.

So an infant can have a mother as a primary caregiver. She’s devoted, she’s with the infant most of the time. She is always responsive to the infant’s distress. She’s loving and caring and holding.

So this kind of infant will develop an internal working model in which his self is seen as worthy as a good object because it is capable of calling upon the mother for comfort when it’s needed and it is then worthy of receiving discomfort, a process known as interpolation, Louis Altwism.

So the mother’s very responsiveness in caring and love inform the child that he is a good object, that he is worthy of all this.

And then the child begins to develop an internal working model where the self is healthy, wanted, loved, worthwhile and the other is also good because mother was good, mother was caring, mother was loving.

In the internal working model of such a baby, the other will also be mother-like, maternal in a way.

There will be an expectation that comfort will be given when needed. There will be an expectation that the other person will show concern for the infant’s and later adult’s state.

So everything is modeled on the initial relationship.

The relationship part of the internal working model includes an expectation of satisfactory resolution of crises and threats with mutual communication in a healthy baby, a baby who is head, baby who has a healthy, loving, caring mother.