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Chapter 6 - The power of reflection.
Mentalization and reflective functioning
Language and emotional processing
Stories and poetry as reflective spaces
Developing empathy and perspective-taking
meeting another type of narrative work - the multi-voice narrative, and from there shifting the focus to another centric concept, which has started to get more and more attention in the past 3 decades in the world of psychotherapy - and this is the concept of Mentalization - or developing an individual’s Theory of Mind, what we may also call - our reflective capacity.
August 5, 2026
Assignments
(Simone De Beauvoir / Monologue – from the collection “The Woman Destroyed”. Translated by: Patrick O’brian).
The woman in this monologue is sharing her stream of consciousness, moving back and forth from present to various phases and encounters throughout her life.
Thinking about the various types of narratives we’ve learned: chronological / disrupted, thematic, spatial or multi-voice and adding to it mentalization and the empathetic story - what kind of bibliotherapeutic intervention would you offer her? It can be built in stages and include more than one technique.