Peter Fonagy, Elizabeth Allison
We explore the interpersonal origins of human culture, arguing that culture emerges as a necessary consequence of our helplessness in infancy, which in turn requires a greater degree of collaboration and social organization than is necessary for other mammals. We propose a model of cultural transmission that depends on a dyadic interpersonal process whose vicissitudes can have a lifelong impact. We explore the role played by imagining subjectively experienced psychological states and processes in others, which we have defined as mentalizing , in the process of cultural transmission, and propose that mentalizing is key to the establishment of epistemic trust-that is to say, an experience of trust that enables the individual to absorb and use the knowledge they are being offered...
2023: Psychoanalytic Quarterly