Sublime

Ego States Theory and Therapy

One of the people who most helped me to understand some aspects of these questions was Professor Joel Nigg, who I interviewed at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland.

Before the groundbreaking work of Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby, the founders of attachment theory in the fifties and sixties, psychologists had no appreciation of the importance of the bond between parent and child.

In addition to the three psychological schools of thought described by Pine, recent years have seen the development of a fourth: mentalisation theory (Fonagy & Bateman, 2006). This theory reserves a central place for the ability of people to correctly assess their own and others’ mental states. People develop this ability via “attachment”, the

An example is provided by one of the best types of therapy for depression, Behavioral Activation (BA).14

Only about 4 percent of all mental health providers in the United States are Black,[30] though Black people make up 13.4 percent of the country’s overall population. When Black and brown Autistic people see white therapists, normal expressions of emotions like anger may be misperceived as excessive or “threatening,” and misdiagnoses are very