Parental reflective functioning: An introduction
ARIETTA SLADE
The City University of New York, Yale Child Study Center, USA
Abstract
Reflective functioning refers to the essential human capacity to understand behavior in light of
underlying mental states and intentions. The construct, introduced by Fonagy, Steele, Steele, Moran,
and Higgitt in 1991, and elaborated by Fonagy and his colleagues over the course of the next decade,
has had an enormous impact on developmental theory and clinical practice. This paper introduces the
construct of parental reflective functioning, which refers to the parent’s capacity to hold the child’s
mental states in mind, and begins with a review of Fonagy and his colleagues’ essential ideas regarding
the reflective function. Next, the applicability of this construct to parental representations of the child
and the parent – child relationship is considered. A system for coding parental reflective functioning,
which will serve as the organizing framework for this special issue, is described. Finally, the three
papers that make up this special section are introduced.
Keywords: Reflective functioning, attachment, parent-child relations
Introduction
This special section in Attachment & Human Development is devoted to explicating and
expanding our understanding of parental reflective functioning, namely the parent’s capacity
to reflect upon her own and her child’s internal mental experience. Reflective functioning
(RF) is an overt manifestation, in narrative, of an individual’s mentalizing capacity. The
construct of mentalization, introduced over 10 years ago by a team of psychoanalytically
oriented attachment researchers, Peter Fonagy, Miriam Steele, Howard Steele, and Mary
Target (Fonagy, Steele, Moran, Steele, & Higgitt, 1991; Fonagy et al., 1995) can be
understood narrowly as the capacity to understand one’s own and others’ behavior in terms
of underlying mental states and intentions, and more broadly as a crucial human capacity
that is intrinsic to affect regulation and productive social relationships.
Richly located at the intersection of attachment and psychoanalytic theories, as well as
current thinking in cognitive neuroscience, this theory represents a significant advance in
understanding the development of basic capacities for self-regulation and relatedness in
early childhood. It has been essential to reframing the way dynamically oriented clinicians
think about the development and interpersonal function of various severe psychopatholo-
gies, most notably the borderline syndromes. Finally, the general theory has led to the
development of instruments to measure reflective functioning in attachment, develop-
mental, and clinical research.
Correspondence: 8 Hodge Road, Roxbury, CT 06783.
Attachment & Human Development,
September 2005; 7(3): 269 – 281
ISSN 1461-6734 print/ISSN 1469-2988 online
2005 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14616730500245906

This paper begins with a brief review of Fonagy and his colleagues’ work describing the
emergence and function of mentalization within a range of theoretical and developmental
contexts. The second section of this paper will concern the question of methodology, and
the measurement of the variable Fonagy and his colleagues have described as crucial to a
range of attachment and other social developmental outcomes, namely the reflective
function, that is, the parent’s capacity to reflect upon and hold the inner life of her child.
Fonagy and his colleagues (Fonagy, Target, Steele, & Steele, 1998) originally measured the
reflective function in adults using a scale that was developed for use with the Adult
Attachment Interview (AAI; George, Kaplan, & Main, 1984) thus adult reflective
functioning was assessed on the basis of an adult’s capacity to reflect upon memorialized
childhood relationships with their parents. As Fonagy and his colleagues have so richly
described, however, it is the parent’s capacity to reflect upon the child’s internal experience
that is so crucial to the development of a secure attachment and to a range of other
developmental outcomes. The work described below was initiated in order to directly
measure reflective processes within the context of the parent – child relationship as they are
manifest in parental descriptions of the ongoing, current, and evolving relationship to the
child. The Parent Development Interview (PDI; Aber, Slade, Berger, Bresgi, & Kaplan,
1985; PDI-R; Slade, Aber, Bresgi, Berger, & Kaplan, 2004) was used to examine a parent’s
capacity to specifically reflect upon her child’s emotional experience or upon her own
experience as a parent,1 using an adaptation (Slade, Bernbach, Grienenberger, Levy, &
Locker, 2004) of the reflective function scale (Fonagy et al., 1998) to score RF. This
adaptation is described in the second section of this paper. In the final and third section,
three papers in this special issue will be introduced, all of which are based upon the
assessment of RF using the PDI or similar instruments, and evaluate the relationship
between parental RF and a range of attachment, social, and developmental outcomes in
both parents and children.
Mentalization and reflective functioning: An overview
Inter and intrapersonal functions
As described in a myriad of ways by Fonagy and his colleagues (Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist, &
Target, 2002), our efforts to try to understand both ourselves and one another are among
the most natural and crucial aspects of human functioning. Whether in times of love or hate,
peace or war, or simply in times of everyday living, human beings try to understand their
own and others’ minds. They use an understanding of mental states—intentions, feelings,
thoughts, desires, and beliefs—to make sense of and, even more importantly, to anticipate
each other’s actions (Fonagy & Target, 1998). It is the reflexive use of such understanding to
make sense of emotional processes that Fonagy and his colleagues refer to as mentalization.
The process of making meaning of internal states serves crucial intrapersonal functions; it
provides the means to discover and give voice to vital aspects of subjective experience, and
allows for deep and broad self-knowledge. This process, whereby internal experience,
feelings, and intentions are mentalized, leads to the development of structures crucial to self
and affect regulation.
Internal states are given meaning and organization not just to enhance self-understanding
and regulation, but so they ‘‘can be communicated to others and interpreted in others to
guide collaboration in work, love, and play’’ (Fonagy et al., 2002, p. 6). It is in this sense that
reflective capacities underlie the development of social relationships and others that are key to
our survival. Were humans not able to see beyond behavior to underlying mental experience,
270 A. Slade