The Spectrum of Mentalization-based Treatments: Update of a Developmental Psychopathology Approach to Borderline Personality Disorder and Allied Conditions

Patrick Luyten, PhD is professor of clinical psychology at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences at University of Leuven in Belgium, as well as a reader at the Research Department of Clinical, Educational, and Health Psychology, at University College London in the UK. He is also a visiting scholar at the Yale Child Study Center, and will be providing this special lecture as part this role.

Dr. Luyten’s main research interests are disorders from the affective spectrum (i.e., depression and stress- and pain-related disorders), and personality disorders. In both areas he is involved in basic research and in interventional research. His basic research focuses on the roles of personality, attachment and social cognition or mentalizing, i.e., the capacity to understand oneself and others in terms of mental states, in these disorders from a developmental psychopathology perspective.

His research is fundamentally translational, as he is interested in translating knowledge concerning the mechanisms involved in the causation of psychopathology to the development of new interventions, the evaluation of their (cost)-effectiveness, and their dissemination to and implementation in routine clinical care.

In recent years, his research has increasingly focused on the development of interventions based on an integrative, evolutionary perspective rooted in the capacity for epistemic trust and salutogenesis, i.e., the capacity to derive benefit from the social environment.

His most recent book, Handbook of Psychodynamic Approaches, was published by Guilford Press in 2015 and received the 2015 Goethe Award for Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Scholarship.

At the Leuven Center for Irish Studies, he heads the Peace and Transformative Growth group. Research within this group focuses on the impact of trauma at both the personal and sociocultural level. Special interests include the role of resilience and transformation in individuals and groups faced with trauma as well as biological and psychosocial processes involved in the intergenerational transmission of trauma and resilience.

Continuing education will not be available for this special add-on session to Grand Rounds.