Mentalizing Inside, Outside, and Beyond 7th International MBT Conference (Online)

Peter Fonagy

Peter Fonagy is the Chief Executive of Anna Freud, London; and holds visiting professorships at Yale and Harvard Medical Schools.

His clinical interests centre on issues of early attachment relationships, social cognition, borderline personality disorder, antisocial behaviour and violence. His longitudinal studies which linked the quality of parent-infant attachment to theory of mind development have important implications for strategies for early prevention not accounted for by genetic influences. The link between human attachment and social cognition led Bateman, Fonagy and colleagues to develop a model of and a highly effective treatment approach for borderline personality disorders (BPD). Mentalization-Based Treatment (MBT) is now one of the two evidence-based psychological treatments used for severe PD and is widely practiced in the UK, Europe and the USA.

Peter is Senior National Clinical Adviser on Children and Young People's Mental Health for NHS England, Programme Director of the UCL Partners Integrated Mental Health programme and has chaired major national expert groups including two NICE Guideline Development Groups on childhood and adolescent depression and the attachment in children at the edge of care.

He is leader of the Mental Health theme in the North Thames CLAHRC and a Senior Investigator for the National Institute of Health Research. He has published nearly 500 scientific papers, 260 chapters and has authored or co-authored 19 books.

He is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Academy of Social Sciences and the American Association for Psychological Science, and was elected to Honorary Fellowship by the American College of Psychiatrists.

He has received Lifetime Achievement Awards from several national and international professional associations including the British Psychological Society, the International Society for the Study of Personality Disorder, the British and Irish Group for the Study of Personality Disorder, the World Association for Infant Mental Health and was in 2015 the first UK recipient of the Wiley Prize of the British Academy for Outstanding Achievements in Psychology by an international scholar.

Sigmund Karterud

Sigmund Karterud, MD, PhD, is a group analyst and professor of psychiatry, formerly at Oslo University, Norway. He has played a significant role in training, research, and organization of group analytic psychotherapy in Scandinavia. His other publications include books on self-psychology, personality, personality disorders and mentalization-based treatment (MBT).

Sebastian Simonsen

Patrick Luyten

Patrick Luyten, PhD, is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, KU Leuven (University of Leuven), Belgium, and Professor of Psychodynamic Psychology at the Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, UCL (University College London), UK. He is also an Assistant Professor, Adjunct at the Yale Child Study Center in New Haven, Connecticut, USA.

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

Carla Sharp

Carla Sharp, Ph.D. is Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Houston and Associate Dean for Faculty and Research. She also directs the Adolescent Diagnosis Assessment Prevention and Treatment Center and the Developmental Psychopathology Lab at the University of Houston. Her work has significantly advanced the scientific understanding of the phenomenology, causes, correlates and treatment of personality pathology in youth. She is the recipient of the 2016 Mid-career award, North American Society for the Study of Personality Disorders and the 2018 Award for Achievement in the Field of Severe Personality Disorders from the Personality Disorders Institute in New York. She is the current Associate Editor for APA journal Personality Disorders: Theory, Research and Treatment, and a workgroup member for updating the American Psychiatric Association practice guidelines for BPD. She has published over 300 peer-reviewed publications in addition to numerous chapters and books. Her work has been funded by the NICHD, NIAAA, NIMH, the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation and other foundations

Nick Midgley

Nick Midgley is Professor of Psychological Therapies for Children and Young People and director of the Child Attachment and Psychological Therapies Research Unit (ChAPTRe) at Anna Freud / UCL, London. He is one of the authors of the book, 'Mentalization-Based Treatment with Children: a Time-Limited Approach' (APA, 2017) and is currently leading the ERiC study, a clinical trial of MBT for school-age children with emotional and behavioural problems.

Norka Malberg

Norka Malberg has 30 years of experience working as a psychotherapist. She is a graduate of the Anna Freud Centre in London and holds a clinical doctorate from University College London in the UK as well as Master level degrees in Clinical and Developmental Psychology from Harvard University and Florida International University. She brings into her practice her experiences as a clinician, researcher and trainer of other professionals as well as my dedication to the well being of her patients. She strives to run a practice based on openness, flexibility and commitment to her clients and their emotional needs.

Bob Drozek

Robert P. Drozek, LICSW, is a clinical social worker and staff psychotherapist at McLean Hospital, specializing in the treatment of personality disorders, trauma and dissociative disorders, and addictions. He is a teaching associate in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and a supervisor in the MBT Clinic at McLean Hospital. Originally trained in MBT in 2010, he currently serves as faculty in the basic and practitioner level MBT trainings offered annually through Anna Freud and McLean’s Gunderson Personality Disorders Institute. His psychoanalytic writings examine the interface between psychotherapy and ethics, with an emphasis on the role of ethics in the patient’s therapeutic change. In MBT, he is co-developer (with Brandon T. Unruh and Anthony W. Bateman) of MBT for Narcissism. He has published on using MBT to address the problem of law enforcement violence, and he has developed the domain-based theory of mentalization, a streamlined heuristic to simplify the teaching and practice of MBT. He is author of Psychoanalysis as an Ethical Process, and co-author of Mentalization-based Treatment for Pathological Narcissism: A Handbook, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. He is in private practice in Belmont, Massachusetts.

Brandon Unruh

Brandon Unruh, M.D. is an Instructor in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the director of the McLean Hospital MBT Training Clinic, a program he created to deliver insurance-based empirically validated outpatient treatment and train interested clinicians in MBT. He is also the assistant medical director of the Gunderson Residence, an intensive specialized residential program for women with severe personality disorders. His clinical approach across various treatment settings is anchored in the integration of evidence-based treatments such as Mentalization-Based Treatment, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, Transference-Focused Psychotherapy, and Good Psychiatric Management. As assistant director of McLean’s BPD Training Institute, he is dedicated to making these treatments more accessible to patients and clinicians around the world. He is a tutor in the basic and practitioner level MBT trainings offered annually in Boston and leads a supplementary 8-week online group training curriculum to assist clinicians in applying what is taught in the MBT manual and intensive trainings. He also offers ongoing group and individual supervision in MBT via online videoconferencing. He has published on a variety of topics including BPD, medical ethics, general hospital psychiatry, and literature and medicine. His academic interests include the convergence of philosophical, spiritual, and psychological issues.

Svenja Taubner

Svenja Taubner is a psychoanalyst, full professor and director at the Institute for Psychosocial Prevention at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Among her many interests is clinical applications, development and research on mentalization based treatments (MBT) for adolescents with externalizing problems and violent behaviour. She is an accredited trainer and supervisor of MBT and currently president of the MBT-D-A-CH (MBT association in German-speaking countries).

Anthony Bateman

Prof Anthony W Bateman MA, FRCPsych consults to Anna Freud about MBT training. He is Visiting Professor University College, London and Honorary Professor in Psychotherapy University of Copenhagen.

He developed Mentalization-Based Treatment with Peter Fonagy for borderline personality disorder and wrote the manual for mental health professionals on Structured Clinical Management of Personality Disorder.

He received a senior scientist award from British and Irish group for the Study of Personality Disorder in 2012 and in 2015 the annual award for "Achievement in the Field of Severe Personality Disorders" from the BPDRC in the USA.

Henning Jordet

Henning Jordet is a clinical psychologist with specialisation in psychotherapy and supervision. He is the CEO of the Norwegian Institute of Mentalization and a co-author on several articles on MBT. Recently he co-authored a book on MBT for avoidant personality disorders in Norwegian. He has been working with MBT in specialised clinical units since 2006 and has provided MBT training and supervision for many years.

The main interest for Jordet is the generic aspects of MBT and how these make MBT highly adaptive for developing treatment for different mental illnesses, such as anxiety disorders, avoidant personality disorder, addiction, eating disorders and antisocial personality disorder, as well as how to tailor the treatment to the specific patient, regardless of the symptoms presented.

He has been the head of specialised psychiatric clinics where these adaptions have been used, and his focus is on utilisation of MBT theory and research in clinical practice. He is an energetic teacher who prefers to use many clinical examples to make the points vivid for his audience. He is also an acknowledged MBT trainer by Global Network of MBT.   

Karin Ensink

Karin Ensink is a psychologist and professor of Psychology in Canada. She has set up MBT-TBM Canada, an organisation dedicated to facilitating MBT training, research and outcome studies. She is a clinician with more than 25 years of experience working with adults, adolescents and children with complex mental health problems involving trauma and personality disorders. She is a supervisor of MBT with adults, as well as MBT-Adolescent and MBT-Child. Her interest in MBT developed while working at Anna Freud in the late 90’s and completing her PhD at UCL with Peter Fonagy and Mary Target on the relationship between mentalizing and psychopathology. She has a developed a range of measures of mentalizing for patients and clinicians. She has published widely on intergenerational patterns of mentalizing and mentalizing as a resilience factor in the context of trauma and personality disorders. She is an author of Mentalization Based Treatment for Children.

Eva Rufenacht

Maaike Smits

Martin Debbane

Prof. Martin Debbané is Professor of Psychopathology at the Research Department of Clinical, Educational, and Health Psychology, University College London (UK), and at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, University of Geneva (Switzerland). With Mario Speranza, he co-founded (2016) the French speaking MBT Network (réseau francophone des thérapies basées sur la mentalization, RF-TBM) based at the University of Geneva. Martin Debbané and his team conduct training and supervision in MBT (basic, practitioner, supervision, family, adolescents) for practitioners in Geneva, Paris, and other francophone countries globally. His research involves a number of longitudinal projects following youth cohorts with clinical risk (schizotypy, borderline, ADHD, antisocial traits) for severe psychopathology. He is a trained and licensed psychodynamic psychotherapist. He acts as associate and trainer in mentalization-based therapies at Anna Freud in London. He teaches, practices and supervises mentalization-based psychotherapy with adolescent and adult patients.

Lois Choi-Kain

Lois W. Choi-Kain, MEd, MD, is the director of the Gunderson Personality Disorders Institute. The institute provides training and supervision for numerous proven treatments, including mentalization-based treatment (MBT), dialectical behavioral therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder (DBT-PTSD), transference focused psychotherapy (TFP), and general psychiatric management (GPM). She works nationally and internationally to expand teaching efforts on borderline personality disorder and its evidence-based treatments and engages in research to study resources for training clinicians who need direction and patients who need access to informed care. With her mentor, John Gunderson, Dr. Choi-Kain developed a training program for GPM and has been expanding its applications.

Majse Lind

Majse Lind is an assistant professor at Aalborg University’s Department of Communication and Psychology . She studies personality and personality pathology with a main focus on narrative identity, mentalization, and mechanisms of change in psychotherapy.

Sebastian Euler

PD Dr Sebastian Euler is a consultant psychiatrist and psychotherapist, deputy clinical director at the Department of Consultation Psychiatry and Psychosomatics at the University Hospital Zurich (Switzerland), and a Private Docent at the University of Zurich (UZH). He has delivered MBT to multidisciplinary teams, offering inpatient and outpatient treatments for personality, eating, and psychosomatic disorders. He has been a senior research fellow at the Research Department of Clinical, Educational, and Health Psychology, University College London (UK) and has published several studies on PD and other disorders. Sebastian is a trained and licensed psychodynamic psychotherapist, group psychotherapist, and specialist for psychosomatics and psychosocial medicine. Supervised by Anthony Bateman, he has been teaching, practicing and supervising MBT and MBT-G in Germany, Switzerland and Austria since 2012. He is an MBT trainer and supervisor and - together with Prof Svenja Taubner - he is chairing the ANFCCF associated German speaking association of MBT (MBT-DACH) and established an MBT training centre in Heidelberg (ge-mit.de).

Mark Dangerfield

Mark Dangerfield holds a PhD in Psychology and is a Clinical Psychologist. He is the director of the Vidal & Barraquer University Institute of Mental Health at Ramon Llull University in Barcelona, Spain. He has worked for over 25 years in public mental health services in Barcelona, and since 2008 at the Vidal & Barraquer Foundation, where he has led the design and implementation of the ECID project (Equipo Clínico de Intervención a Domicilio, Home Intervention Clinical Team).

The ECID project was launched in 2017 and is a pioneering initiative in Spain, as it is the first clinical service in the public mental health network targeting extremely high-risk and non-help-seeking adolescents. The ECID is an intensive, in-home, mentalization-based treatment for adolescents (MBT-A) program delivered in an AMBIT framework.  

He also leads a research project on the acceptability and effectiveness of the ECID project, that received a national award in Spain in 2023 for improving quality in mental health care. He is an AMBIT and MBT-A accredited trainer and supervisor. 

Bente Sommerfeldt

Bente Sommerfeldt is the Academic director of Institute for Eating Disorders, Oslo; Specialist in clinical psychology; PhD Candidate, Department of Psychology, University of Oslo; and Board leader of the Institute for Mentalization in Norway.

Her clinical interests centre on issues around eating disorders, trauma, self-harm and personality problems, both with children, young people, parenthood and adults. She has extensive activities as a teacher and supervisor within mentalization-based treatments within a wide range of disorders such as eating disorders, personality disorders, trauma, and substance abuse. She has been working with developing and implementing mentalization-based interventions for eating disorders over the past 15 years, and engaged in mentalization-based mileu therapeutic work and team work where colleague support is central. In recent years, she has studied mothers' relationship with food and body and how becoming pregnant and a new mother affects mental health and care in connection with the doctoral project “Bodies out of control. Eating disorders, pregnancy and early maternity”.

Relevant authorships:

Robinson, P., Skårderud, F., & Sommerfeldt, B. (2019). Hunger. Mentalization-based treatments for eating disorders. Springer Link.

Skårderud, F., Sommerfeldt, B. & Robinson, P. (2020). Sult. Mentaliseringsbaserte tilnærminger til spiseforstyrrelser. Oslo: Gyldendal forlag.

Skårderud, F. & Sommerfeldt. B. (2014). Miljøterapiboken. Mentalisering som holdning og praksis. Oslo: Gyldendal forlag.

The MBT International conference welcomes submission of individual papers on current research on mentalizing and allied topics. Submissions are restricted to individuals who are within 10 years of their primary academic or clinical qualification, and should be submitted by 15 May 2025.

The organising committee intends to give an MBT Early Researcher award to the individual who presents the most original and creative paper as judged by an MBT expert panel.

Presentations may be of completed or ongoing research, or of projects that have not yet been submitted as part of any organised thematic research project. They may have a clinical or an academic focus and there is no restriction on age range.

There will be a maximum of 15 minutes to present a paper and the scientific committee will organize papers of similar topics to be presented during the same time slot. The scientific committee will assign a chair to each paper session.

The following structure must be followed when submitting an abstract:

1. Background

2. Methods

3. Results

4. Conclusions

All accepted abstracts will require the presenters and authors to register to attend congress and pay the relevant registration fee.

Basic information to be submitted on abstract:

• presenting author’s contact details

• author affiliation details – department, institution or organisation, city, state, country

• abstract title – max 30 words

• abstract text – max 300 words

• conflict of interest disclosure – any conflict of interest at the time of submission

Please note that this is for in-person attendees only.

Celebrate the end of a successful conference with a gala dinner, dining, and an opportunity to network and unwind with fellow attendees. Kosmopol proudly invites you to a special evening with a welcoming drink, three-course meal, two drinks (choice of wine), tea or coffee served with dessert.

Time: 18:00 – midnight

Cost: £92

Venue: Kosmopol - afhold dine møder, kurser og konferencer i København

How to get there: Please see map for more information

How to book: Early booking is recommended as spaces are limited, if you are interested, please book through our booking above. Please note, at booking you will be asked for any dietary or special requirements which will be shared with Kosmopol, we will be in touch if needed.

Cancellation policy: If you would like to cancel your place, please email mbtscm@annafreud.org.

Please note, in line with restaurant policy we are unable to issue refunds for any cancellations after Wednesday 2 April 2025. Any cancellations prior this date will be issued a full refund.

Don’t miss this unforgettable evening – book your tickets and make the most of this exceptional conference experience.

If you would like to attend in-person, please visit our in-person booking page.

Please note there are a limited number of student concessionary rate places for this conference. If you are interested in attending this conference at the concessionary rate, please email training@annafreud.org for details. You need to provide proof you are a student to be eligible.

The 6th International MBT Congress on February 2022

“Very enjoyable and refreshing for my clinical work”

“It gave me a new overall view on mentalizing and more ways of going ahead”

“Very meaningful experience - Looking forward to further such conferences”

“Outstanding conference and wonderfully organized”

MBT Basic training in Boston January 2024: (Anthony Bateman, Lois Choi-Kain, Brandon Unruh and Bob Drozek)

“I felt very privileged to have had the opportunity to be taught by Dr. Bateman who is clearly an exceptional clinician, theoretician, teacher and person.”

“Dr. Bateman and the other teachers were all excellent and personable.”

“the clinicians demonstrated the not-knowing stance with us as learners and the felt-sense with them was profoundly helpful in learning.”

“the clinicians demonstrated the not-knowing stance with us as learners and the felt-sense with them was profoundly helpful in learning.”

MBT Basic training in Madrid, 8th, 9th and 10th April 2024: (Anthony Bateman)

“to have had Professor Bateman as an instructor was a luxury”

MBT Basic training 5th, 6th, 7th June 2024: (Anthony Bateman)

“I would like to thank Professor Bateman not only for his clear and inspiring presentation of MBT but also for his inspiring hands-on work with patients that made the course complete.”

“Professor Bateman's beginning and ending summaries were supremely helpful”

MBT Narcissism training 8th, 10th and 11th May 2024: (Anthony Bateman, Bob Drozek and Brandon Unruh)

“I was also particularly struck by the compassion and humility of Brandon Unruh and Bob Drozek who imparted their knowledge in such accessible and helpful ways”

“The speakers were engaging and friendly and expressive”

“The trainers were engaging and friendly and expressive”