Glossary
This glossary explains recurring terms and specialist language used across MINDinMIND recordings, events, interviews and thought pieces.
Active Inference
Active inference is a way of describing how minds and bodies continually predict, test and update what is happening in the world. On MINDinMIND it sits close to Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle and helps connect neuroscience, therapy and lived experience.
Attachment Theory
Attachment theory explores how early relationships shape a child's sense of safety, trust and expectation of care. It is central to much child psychotherapy, infant mental health and parent-child work discussed on MINDinMIND.
Baby Blindspot
The baby blindspot refers to the way babies' emotional lives and mental health needs can be overlooked in policy, services and public conversation. MINDinMIND uses the term to draw attention to babies as people with inner worlds and relational needs from the beginning.
Child Psychotherapy
Child psychotherapy is a specialist therapeutic approach that helps children and young people express, understand and work through emotional distress. It often uses play, relationship and careful observation as routes into feelings that may not yet be easy to put into words.
Circle of Security
Circle of Security is an attachment-based model that helps adults understand children's needs for comfort, exploration and secure connection. It gives parents, carers and clinicians a map for noticing what a child may be asking for beneath behaviour.
Complex Trauma
Complex trauma describes the effects of repeated or prolonged traumatic experiences, often within important relationships or caregiving settings. It can affect trust, emotional regulation, identity, memory and the capacity to feel safe with others.
Countertransference
Countertransference refers to the feelings, thoughts and bodily responses stirred in a therapist during clinical work. In psychoanalytic and relational practice these responses can become useful information about the client's inner world and relationships.
Dissociation
Dissociation is a protective response in which aspects of experience become disconnected from ordinary awareness. It may affect memory, bodily sensation, identity or emotion, and is often discussed in relation to trauma and overwhelming states.
Eating Disorders
Eating disorders are serious mental health difficulties involving food, eating, body image and control. MINDinMIND content approaches them not only as symptoms around eating, but as complex emotional and relational struggles.
Free Energy Principle
The Free Energy Principle is Karl Friston's theory of how living systems reduce uncertainty by predicting and adapting to their environments. In therapeutic contexts it can offer a scientific language for expectation, surprise, change and emotional life.
Infant Mental Health
Infant mental health focuses on the emotional wellbeing, relationships and development of babies and very young children. It pays close attention to early caregiving relationships, because these relationships shape a baby's developing mind and body.
Infant Observation
Infant observation is a psychoanalytic training and research method in which a baby and family are observed closely over time. It helps clinicians notice the subtle communications, rhythms and relationships that shape early development.
Mentalization
Mentalization is the capacity to understand behaviour in terms of feelings, thoughts, wishes and intentions. In therapy it helps people make sense of themselves and others, especially when strong emotions make relationships feel confusing or unsafe.
Neglect
Neglect is the absence of reliable care, attention, protection or emotional responsiveness that a child needs to develop. Its effects may be less visible than overt abuse, but can be profound for attachment, self-worth and development.
Object Relations
Object relations is a psychoanalytic way of thinking about how early relationships become part of a person's inner world. It is especially interested in how people carry internal images of self and others into later relationships.
Online Therapy
Online therapy refers to therapeutic work carried out by video or other remote means. MINDinMIND content has explored both the difficulties and possibilities of maintaining connection, play and emotional presence when therapy is not in the same room.
Parent-Infant Psychotherapy
Parent-infant psychotherapy supports the relationship between a baby and parent or caregiver. It attends to the baby's communications, the parent's feelings and history, and the developing bond between them.
Polyvagal Theory
Polyvagal Theory describes how the autonomic nervous system shapes states of safety, mobilisation and shutdown. In therapy it is often used to understand how bodies respond to threat, connection and regulation.
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a tradition of understanding unconscious feelings, conflicts and patterns in relationships. It has strongly influenced child psychotherapy and many MINDinMIND conversations about development, trauma and inner life.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy
Psychoanalytic psychotherapy applies psychoanalytic thinking in therapeutic practice. It pays close attention to unconscious meanings, early experience, defences, transference and the therapeutic relationship.
Reflective Functioning
Reflective functioning is the ability to think about one's own mind and the minds of others. In parenting and therapy it supports curiosity about what feelings and intentions may sit beneath behaviour.
Rupture and Repair
Rupture and repair describes moments when connection breaks down and is then restored. In development and therapy, repair can be as important as attunement because it helps people learn that relationships can survive misunderstanding and distress.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
Sensorimotor psychotherapy is a body-oriented therapy that works with posture, movement, sensation and nervous system responses. It is often used in trauma work, where the body may hold experiences that words alone cannot reach.
Severe Personality Disorders
Severe personality disorders involve enduring patterns of emotional pain, relationship difficulty, identity disturbance and defensive organisation. MINDinMIND content, especially around Otto Kernberg, considers how careful treatment can address these intense and complex states.
Still-Face
The still-face experiment shows how quickly babies react when a caregiver becomes emotionally unresponsive. It is often used to understand infant communication, stress, repair and the importance of responsive caregiving.
Therapeutic Relationship
The therapeutic relationship is the working emotional bond between therapist and client. Across many approaches it is not just the setting for treatment, but a key part of how understanding, safety and change can happen.
The Unconscious
The unconscious refers to feelings, wishes, memories and conflicts that influence us without being fully known. Psychoanalytic work is especially interested in how unconscious meanings appear through symptoms, dreams, play, relationships and repeated patterns.
Transference
Transference is the way earlier feelings and relationship patterns can be brought into the present, including into therapy. Noticing transference can help therapist and client understand old expectations that are shaping current experience.
Trauma
Trauma is the lasting psychological and bodily impact of experiences that overwhelm a person's ability to cope. MINDinMIND content often explores trauma through child development, attachment, the body and therapeutic repair.
Traumatised Children
Traumatised children are children whose development and emotional life have been affected by frightening, harmful or overwhelming experiences. Helpful work with them usually requires safety, patience, relationship and attention to behaviour as communication.
Undoing Aloneness
Undoing aloneness is Diana Fosha's phrase for the therapeutic experience of no longer being alone with unbearable feelings. It describes how deep emotional change can happen when suffering is met with attuned, responsive presence.
