Different ways of defining Mentalization:

To see ourselves from the outside and others from the inside

Understanding misunderstanding

Having mind in mind

Mindfulness of minds

Introspection for subjective self-construction – know yourself as others know you but also know your subjective self

Those psychological skills that allow us to spontaneously and largely in an intuitive manner make sense of the actions of oneself and others by reference to mental states such as beliefs, desires and feelings. Peter Fonagy (2004)

Birth of Mentalizing:

"The baby looks at his mother’s face and finds himself there" Donald Winnicott

"She/he thinks that I think, therefore I am" Peter Fonagy

Anna Freud, talking of her admiration for August Aichhorn as a teacher and therapist: “So often teachers are in a hurry to get their students to know something, to have the right answers: a possession. Aichhorn knew how to scratch his head and say: Well, we can look at this boy in this way, but we can also look at him in that way, and there may be other ways, too. He was challenging us: can you do the same – focus and refocus, shift your angle of vision, adjust your point of view?” From Anna Freud: the dream of psychoanalysis by Robert Coles, pub. Addison-Wesley, 1992

From literature:

Do not sit at home,
Do not go to the forest,
But recognise mind
Wherever you are.

Saraha - "Treasury of songs"
c. 1st millenium AD

A pair of wings, a different mode of breathing which would enable us to traverse infinite space would in no way help us for if we visited Mars or Venus keeping the same senses they would clothe in the same aspects as the things of the earth everything that we should be capable of seeing. The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of eternal youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is…….with this, we really do fly from star to star.'

Marcel Proust from The Captive

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.
Wisdom begins in wonder.

Socrates

‘Teach thy tongue to say I do not know and thou shalt progress’.

Maimonides (1135–1204) physician-philosopher

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion:
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us,
An' ev'n devotion!

Robert Burns (1759 – 1796)
From "To A Louse: On Seeing One On A Lady's Bonnet, At Church" - 1786