What Is Reflective Functioning? Mentalization, Attachment Theory & RF Scoring with Dr. Miriam Steele

In this episode, Dr. Puder hosts a conversation with Dr. Miriam Steele, a leading expert in reflective functioning (RF), mentalization, and attachment theory. They explore the origins of RF from the pioneering work of Peter Fonagy and John Bowlby in the London Parent-Child Project, its role in predicting secure attachments and sensitive parenting, and distinctions from empathy. Conversation topics include cutting-edge research on mentalization-based treatment (MBT) and transference-focused psychotherapy (TFP) for borderline personality disorder (BPD) and eating disorders, therapist RF's impact on patient outcomes, body image representations, and smartphone effects on parent-child bonds. By listening to this episode, you can earn 1.5 Psychiatry CME Credits. https://www.psychiatrypodcast.com/cme-program Link to blog https://www.psychiatrypodcast.com/psychiatry-psychotherapy-podcast/episode-260-what-is-reflective-functioning-mentalization-attachment-theory-amp-rf-scoring-with-dr-miriam-steele Link to YouTube video https://youtu.be/UxA_OiAGU50 Main Attachment https://mainattachment.org/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:14David Puder?

  All right. Welcome back to the podcast. I am joined today with Dr. Miriam Steele. She's a PhD researcher, psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, who was involved in the early studies on reflective function and ongoing on the new studies coming out. Her husband was on a prior episode and they both co-authored with Fonagy, The Manual of Reflective Function. Today, we're going to be talking about reflective function. We're going to be talking about understanding how it can help us understand ourselves, how to increase compassion for ourselves, where some of the gaps can be,

• 0:55David Puder?

  and then where we can have some compassion increases as we think through our own journey, think through our own reflective function. So, welcome to the podcast.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Thank you very much, David. Very happy to be here.

• 1:09David Puder?

  So, maybe you could start by just defining reflective function.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Okay. So, reflective functioning has to do with the capacity to think about thoughts, intentions, and feelings in oneself as well as in another person. And that capacity has been shown to be linked to responsive and sensitive caregiving in terms of parent-child relationships, which in and of itself leads to something similar in the child in terms of their capacity to also put themselves in someone else's shoes. And it is becoming apparent more recently that it is perhaps the mechanism of change in psychotherapeutic work. So, it started for us looking at...

• 1:57Speaker 01

  The narratives that we prompted from adults in response to the adults attachment interview and from those interviews that we collected even before a first baby was born, we could predict something about the nature of that child's tie to each parent. And from there, it's become very popular to think about that specific mechanism, not necessarily unlike empathy or insight, but slightly different in this context in terms of the fact that with reflective functioning, we actually have an empirical measure. We have a scale that you alluded to that allows us to rate narratives of many different kinds, as well as to listen differently within psychotherapeutic contexts.

• 2:43David Puder?

  Yeah, so how is it different than empathy? How is it deeper than empathy?

• 2:50Speaker 01

  I think it's deeper in that it is much more specific in terms of one quality of empathy. And empathy, I think, is a very kind of broad overview. And this is something very specific that contains within it different ramifications as well as different specificities. So, for example, in response to the adults attachment interview question around, why do you think your parents behaved as they did during your childhood? That is one that demands a reflective response. And I think just pure empathy wouldn't get at the specificity. So what we're looking for there is for the individual's capacity to put themselves in their parent's shoes, what was going on for them

• 3:34Speaker 01

  when they were parenting early childhood and then beyond, as well as to put themselves in their own shoes. What was it like for them growing up? Do they have a developmental perspective? That is, putting themselves back there and then into the here and now. And that is an example of why it's more than just empathy, because it has these other dimensions to it that are quite specific.

• 4:01David Puder?

  Okay, and so maybe if you could back up just a little bit and give me a quick history, how did you get involved with Fonagy in the early studies? Tell me about some of the early launch tunnel work you did in the London Parent-Child Project Adoption Studies.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  So, we got to London because I very much wanted to undertake psychoanalytic training at the Anafroyd Centre. It was kind of the centre, London, of psychoanalytic work and trainings. So that was my first kind of goal, to train as a child psychoanalyst. I knew, though, that I needed a PhD, and Peter Fonagy was very close to some of the eminent analysts at the Anafroyd Centre, especially someone called Joseph Sandler. So, Joe Sandler was a very famous object relations theorist, and my husband Howard was signed up to work with him on a PhD. And so, looking around, Peter Fonagy seemed to be the best option for me in terms of

• 5:01Speaker 01

  looking for a supervisor. And so, it was kind of this serendipitous moment in terms of what was available and that I wanted to do those two things at once, the child analytic training and the PhD. So I came to Peter and said, "I want to do this study on intergenerational patterns of attachment." It was 1985, 1986, when this monograph by the Society for Research in Child Development came out with "The Move to the Level of Representation," this incredibly paradigm-shifting, seminal moment where Mary May presented to the world some of her unique assessments to do with attachment, including the adult attachment interview.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  And at that time, Peter turned to me and said, "I don't know anything about attachment. Why don't you go talk to John Bowlby?" And I was a young 25-year-old, and like, I can't go talk to John Bowlby. Yeah. And he said, no, no, it's, it's, he's, he's there at the Tavistock. So for some of us older folks, you might remember that before email, you actually had to write a letter to someone and wait for their response. So I wrote to his secretary and she wrote back offering an appointment. And so the London Parent-Child Project really, I do feel has John Bowlby's stamp on it in terms of his guidance. Because as I was going to him to describe what we're, we were intending to do,

• 6:27Speaker 01

  he said, well, Mary Main and Eric Essie are coming to the Tavistock Clinic in London to train people in the adult attachment interview. I think you should do the training. So we brought that back to Peter and he understood the potential gold that was in there in terms of doing the training. So the three of us undertook that training all the way through with Bowlby's guiding hand on parts of the research. And so we were aiming to show that even before a baby is born, we could predict the quality of their attachment to each parent. One of the unique features of our study is including fathers

• 7:08Speaker 01

  all the way through as much as mothers, which even to this day is unfortunately not the focus or as much of the focus as it should be. And we were able to show that when we collected these 100 interviews from mothers expecting their first babies. So it was the transition to parenthood, which is another important feature. What does it do to your attachment system to go through, going from being perhaps an individual or partner, but not yet a parent? How does that change your own representational world to do with attachment? And then we studied, so we had 100 mothers and there are 100 fathers, the partners. And we then followed them up by inviting them to come to University College London,

• 7:53Speaker 01

  where we were doing our PhDs so that we could conduct a strange situation assessment, 12 months with mother, 18 months with father. That was very much trying to replicate Mary Main's seminal study of trying to find a match between the ways the babies behaved in the strange situation and what was In the minds of the parents who gave rise to those patterns. So Mary Mayne did it retrospectively. She had parents of six-year-olds on whom she had strain situations from eighteen months and twelve months prior and could make a match between them. We were very interested, could you even get to this before the baby's even born?

• 8:34Speaker 01

  And we found with about seventy-five percent accuracy, we could make those predictions.

• 8:39David Puder?

  What percent accuracy?

• 8:41Speaker 01

  About seventy-five percent.

• 8:43David Puder?

  And so what kind of predictions were you making?

• 8:46Speaker 01

  So if the parent delivered a narrative to us in response to the eighteen questions of the adult detachment interview, which was classified as secure. So one gets a set of ratings, how loving was the parent, how rejecting, how role reversing, that is, turning things upside down so that the child felt some responsibility in even parenting the parent. We looked for a set of scores around idealization, derogation of parent, current anger. And then one of the central pieces is coherence. And that's really one of the big names of the game in attachment assessments. Out of these different parts of what we're looking at, whether it's the behavior of

• 9:30Speaker 01

  the infant in the strain situation, or the adult in response to the adult detachment interview, does it hang together? Are there contradictions that don't make sense? Is there enough detail in what they're telling us? And within that, it was our reading of these two hundred interviews that we discovered reflective functioning. That is, Mary Mayne had a scale called metacognition, which wasn't very developed at the time, which is the individual's capacity in the moment of saying something to catch themselves, kind of a Freudian slip moment, like, oh, wow, I said my father died when, or I died when I was fourteen years old, instead of my father died.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Those kind of slips without realizing it. We misunderstood, actually, that scale originally, and we were thinking of it much more in terms of theory of mind, in terms of putting oneself in someone else's shoes. So it was Peter's great delight when Mary Mayne and Eric Hesse were visiting our London lab, and we told them about the way that we were coding metacognition. And Mary Mayne said, that's not what I had in mind, that's not the scale. We saw Peter smiling, couldn't quite understand it. doctoral students and when they left, we were like, wow, we're in trouble here. But like, what are we going to do? And he said, no, this is great.

• 10:51David Puder?

  Oh.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  We would call it our own variable. Um, and that was the birth of reflective functioning.

• 11:00David Puder?

  Okay. And so how did, how did reflective functioning compare to some of the other measures of attachment in the adult attachment interview that were already there that you all probably also already also scored? How did reflective functioning uniquely show something?

• 11:15Speaker 01

  So I think it showed something around how people might have arrived at their classification. So the adult attachment interview is taking into account early childhood experiences, but not just what happened, but what the person makes of those experiences. That's really, that's really the key. So individuals who face a lot of adversity, but somewhere along the line where they've learned to process, to metabolize, to come to terms with those experiences. There was something in the way they talked about their childhood, which was so impressive, sometimes even more impressive than those individuals who had relatively good enough family upbringings.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  There's something about overcoming and working through possible trauma or trauma that really showed us something about this reflective functioning construct. So we actually divided our sample up into two halves, those who suffered from adversity. So things like a parent being medically or psychiatrically ill, fathers being out of the family context. Remember, we were collecting this data in the 1980s. And so that had different kind of meaning than it might have in 2026. Children going off to boarding school before the age of 11. This was before Harry Potter made it very cool to go to boarding school. So we included that as a, as a, as a variable.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  And what we found is if we divided them up into those individuals who face at least two of those adversities versus those who didn't. And they had this capacity of reflective functioning that we coded. There was an overarching response that all of their children were securely attached to them. If an individual faced adversity but didn't have this capacity of reflective functioning, every single one of them but one child was insecurely attached. So that's where the focus became for us. What is going on? How to promote reflective functioning? But it feels like that is one of the keys towards secure attachment in the adult.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  And very importantly alongside that is their capacity to provide sensitive and responsive caregiving to their child, which would result in secure attachment in the child.

• 13:35David Puder?

  Amazing, yeah. And I feel like there's been so much research since that early study that has continually proved this to be such an amazing measure that has such strong predictive validity, right? And when I think about, you know, if a scale, if a measurement is valid, it's like, what is the predictive ability of this measure? And it seems so strong and so black and white. It's not just a point two correlation like a lot of social sciences are. You know, it's like, this is a huge link, right? How do you feel it's developed since then? Like, what kind of research are you most excited about that has come out since then?

• 14:18David Puder?

  And kind of like, let me understand kind of where you feel the field has come since.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, so if I can just say a few words about the amazing part of that prediction. So when we took our results to John Bowlby and showed him, he was shocked. He said, you know, we can't even predict the weather. And that we can predict something as nuanced and as in some ways elusive to measure and as sophisticated as a parent-child relationship.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  From what one person says in words to a totally different human being's behavior in the strain situation is rather amazing.

• 14:57David Puder?

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  You know, so much of this goes back to, you know, some of our central ideas within a psychodynamic, psychanalytic context. That is, the power and the influence of early experience and how that unfolds over time. So it is, but the power comes from having an empirical measure, having some way of measuring that rather than it being, "Oh, we know this to be true," or "we think that this is the case." Right? It's, it's, it's in our evidence-based world hugely important. I think, you know, some of the exciting work, and Peter Fonagy's really been the one at the forefront of this, is to take the reflective functioning construct, that which we measure in something like an interview,

• 15:40Speaker 01

  and think about it in a clinical context, often termed mentalization. And in some ways, those are just the same thing. They're not very, very different. One is just the empirical measure. Mentalization is more of the kind of theoretical or clinical construct that comes with that. And so Peter developed the mentalization-based treatment, MBT. First of all, because he was really interested in what goes on with individuals who have a borderline personality disorder diagnosis. What is going on? And it was his insight to see that they lack this capacity of reflective functioning, or mentalization is very hard for them to accurately put themselves in someone else's shoes

• 16:25Speaker 01

  or to have an understanding of their own accountability or the way in which their own behavior can be predicted by themselves. Right? So there's a, there's a gap, there's some kind of deficit. And so there's now a huge industry around mentalization-based treatments in every kind of flavor, both continuing on with those with borderline personality disorder, but there's versions for children, versions for adolescents, and it has a very strong evidence base. So that's like one place that it's gone. It's also gone in different directions in terms of the research. There are people who are able to find that a psychotherapy

• 17:04Speaker 01

  Intervention like transference-focused psychotherapy that was initiated by Otto Kernberg, Clark and Diana Diamond, Ken Levy had his hand in that as well. And it was actually Ken Levy who initiated a study looking at transference-focused psychotherapy and reflective functioning and showing that the treatment actually increases RF and that goes hand in hand with better psychiatric outcomes. So some of those places is very exciting in terms of showing that a psychotherapeutic treatment has an impact on a patient or client's RF and that that, we think, is the mechanism

• 17:48Speaker 01

  of change, that that is what's changing, regardless of the modality. So it doesn't have to be a psychodynamic or attachment-based intervention, even, you know, purely behavioral intervention or a CBT or a DBT intervention. That's what's changing. It doesn't change perhaps as dramatically as something like transference-focused psychotherapy or MBT because that is focused exactly on that construct where there are other things going on in those other modalities. So that's one place. In our own research, we're doing a lot of work thinking about body representations. It's kind of been left out, interestingly, from the attachment literature, both the research and the clinical.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  And so we use something called the MIR interview that was developed by Paulina Kernberg, the late wife of Otto Kernberg and a colleague in Copenhagen, Bernadette Bull Nielsen, looking at the impact of attachment on one's body representation. And so we've got a whole series of studies looking at intergenerational transmission of body representations and attachment from mothers to babies, to their toddler girls. And we find some very interesting results in that match. We've done it with a sample of gay men. We've done it recently. We're wrapping up a study looking at individuals with physical disabilities and their adult's attachment interviews and body representations.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  So that's like a unique space that RF is right in the center of. And then we're also doing a study looking at the influence of smartphone use or cellphone use on parent-child attachment. So we're collecting adult attachment interviews. What were our hunch or hypothesis is those individuals with higher RF or reflective functioning. It's not that they're not going to be using their phones with their kids. That's not possible anymore. The phones are here to stay, but they might do it differently. It might be a buffer against the negative impact of technology. Because there's more of a sense of putting themselves in their child's shoes

• 19:56Speaker 01

  or being able to pause themselves in some of the behavior that leads us to pick up our phones when we're with our kids.

• 20:04David Puder?

  Amazing, yeah, I think um.

• 20:07David Puder?

  I think this is, there's, there's so much good stuff there. I'm, I've been actually puzzled. There was an early study where they looked at the, the reflective function and the scores in people with BPD and it was about 2.7. And the people with eating disorder was about 2.7 as well. And so do you, it sounds like you might have a why for that. What would be the why for why someone with an eating disorder would have a lower reflective function?

• 20:33Speaker 01

  I think probably, you know, something similar in terms of, you know, the rigidity of a defensive structure. You know, so that it precludes, right, they're not being very in touch with what's going on with their bodies. The misattribution, right? So when they look in the mirror and they see someone much larger than themselves. And some of the rudiments that could be connected to aspects of parent-child relationships, which have gone askew somewhere along the line, leading to dampening down of reflective functioning early on. And so some of the work would be to ignite the curiosity within these patients about

• 21:14Speaker 01

  what's going on within themselves, both their bodies, but as well as their thoughts and feelings. So I think there's something about the shutting down part of reflective functioning that could lead to something as serious as an eating disorder or borderline personality disorder.

• 21:32David Puder?

  So I'm sure you're aware of John Coligan. He did an article 2017 called Therapist Reflective Functioning, Therapist Attachment Style, Therapist Effectiveness. And he was looking at reflective function in the therapists. Right? And then he looked at the patients that they were treating. They measured the OKU 45, which is probably the gold standard for session to session changes. And the therapist reflective function predicted how fast patients would get better. For those of you who are watching this on YouTube or X, I'll pull up the graph here I've given.

• 22:13David Puder?

  So it's like, basically, you have the slope at which people get better. If their high reflective function is much sharper than medium reflective function and low reflective function, they don't get better much at all. Which is my thesis on bad therapy and kind of the cultural impetus to say, you know, not all therapy is good. It's like, yeah, you could have a low reflective function therapist. This seems to be irrespective of modality. Do you have any thoughts on this? Because, you know, I love mentalization based therapy. I love transphobia therapy. But I've been thinking more and more about this, that the provider themselves, right? And their reflective function.

• 22:58David Puder?

  Any thoughts on this?

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Yes, it's kind of, in some ways, can be a very painful realization for those of us quite tied to our modality to learn that it doesn't matter.

• 23:09David Puder?

  Well, it matters, but maybe in a different way than...

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Yes, because the vast majority of psychotherapy process or psychotherapy outcome research all seems to come down to this point, that it is the person of the therapist that actually accounts for why their therapy works. I think that our modality is really important to us as it gives us a toolbox and a way of working.

• 23:34David Puder?

  Right.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  So I think in that realm, it's really, really important. Right? So I think it would be hard for some of us to deliver... An intervention that is outside of a modality. And sometimes they have research studies like this with the same therapist is asked to deliver a psychodynamic approach and then a CBT approach. Because then you have, the person is constant. Except, you know, it's not exactly constant because, you know, that's really forcing someone to think outside of the box, to push that envelope, whatever metaphor you want in terms of doing something that doesn't feel so comfortable. I think the issue, you know, it's a bit of a tricky issue. What do we do here about this? You know, do we select therapists?

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Do we do something like an AI at an admissions interview for a clinical psychology or social work program, or licensed mental health, or a psychotherapy training? Right? In some ways, we know this. It would make sense that we would want to engage people who are securely attached. On the other hand, most of us are in this line of work, not because we necessarily had the easy, good enough kind of childhood experience. Some along the line, we became very interested in the psychology of ourselves, the psychology of the other, how things work in people. And so I think some of that flatlining, you know, will come from individuals who perhaps

• 25:03Speaker 01

  haven't worked through some of these issues themselves, and makes it very hard for them to listen to patients with an accuracy and a compassion that would come from higher RF individuals. But I think there's been some studies, not a lot actually, on, you know, that study is unique. There were some early studies Mary Dozier did with Roger Kowak on galvanic skin responses in therapy and those kinds of matches showing, you know, which might have better outcomes than others. But I think, you know, it's a ethically vulnerable place to go to, you know, actually, in terms

• 25:43Speaker 01

  of impingement on privacy, you know, for example, to do those kinds of. But it is the person. And I think that that allows both the therapist to be present in a very powerful way with, you know, regardless of what they're picking up or saying in words. But it's also how they think and feel about the patient.

• 26:05David Puder?

  Yeah, so this this comes down to my sort of new hypothesis or new the cohorts I'm running, it's kind of like, OK, I don't think you can ethically grade people on their reflective function because it is so personal coming into therapy school, right? And I think the best time to grow is when you don't have the pressure of some outside institution that's saying, we're going to gatekeep you here, right? And then the other thing I've realized is that increasing in reflectiveness or reflective function, it's a life journey. And even in the best studies of transference focused therapy, they're only increasing about one point per one year of pretty intensive therapy.

• 26:46David Puder?

  And so we're on 11 point scale, negative one to nine, nine being the highest, nine being something you never see according to yourself.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Except for you and I.

• 26:56David Puder?

  Ah, no, see, that's that's not true. Well, you know, it's OK, so this kind of came to, you know, how we connected, just to self disclosure, I got my AI done with Merriam, and there were some passages that were lower than others, right? Not all were not all were perfect, and and I think that's that's OK, right? That's what I've I've been thinking about in these cohorts. It's like, wherever you start from, that's OK. The goal is to increase and the goal, the goal is not to look like it's higher, but to actually do the work so that it gets higher, right? So, you know, I was, I was thinking what we do is make this very practical at this point.

• 27:40David Puder?

  And I, I went back through Abraham Lincoln, and I pulled up some passages and I created some passages. And so we would look at his reflective function to kind of bring this to life a little bit. So here we go. I'm going to actually pull up, I put this on PowerPoint, you know, and for those of you who don't know, Abraham Lincoln probably had more of a depressive personality. He had a very harsh internal critic. So, OK, here's the first passage. So this is an actual letter he wrote to John T Stewart regarding Anne Ruddalidge's death in 1835.

• 28:24David Puder?

  OK, and he wrote this in 1841. So just to give you a picture, this was six years later.

• 28:30David Puder?

  So he wrote to his friend, "For not giving you a general summary of news, you must pardon me. It is not in my power to do so. I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole of human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better, I cannot tell. I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible. I must die or be better, it appears to me. The matter you speak of on my account, you may attend to as you say,

• 29:13David Puder?

  unless you shall hear of my condition forbidding it. I say this because I fear I shall be unable." So what would you rate this RF?

• 29:26Speaker 01

  You know, there's many compelling features to his very poetic prose. And one of the things we can really, you know, hear in that is his suffering, right? And his capacity to describe that suffering.

• 29:40David Puder?

  Right.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  I think probably in the... Well, if you bring it back up, I can...

• 29:48David Puder?

  Okay, okay.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  Bring it back up. So we can go through some of the specifics. Okay, so even that you must pardon me, like you, you know, he's coming into this interview where he has a sense of what it is the interviewer is looking for. And he's asking, he's saying, "I have an understanding of what you're looking for, but you must pardon me," right? So there's something somewhat relational in that. And he's saying, you know, "It's not my power to do so. I can't, I can't." Now, he says, "I'm now the most miserable man living," right? So that's, you know, hyperbole. It's quite extreme. He can't know that he's the most miserable man, but what he's saying is that it's very bad. And then this poetic thing around,

• 30:30Speaker 01

  "If my misery was distributed among all of humankind, nobody would be cheerful." That's, that's how bad it is. So he does have... Some sense in using this poetry about the impact of his words. Right. He is speaking to an audience. He's not oblivious and just embedded in his own experience. He's really trying to share what this feels like to him. And he says, then whether I shall ever be better, I cannot tell. I awfully forebode I shall not, right? So that's just kind of sitting in in the depression and and more around how it's impossible. I mean, as he is, he should, he need, he needs to die or be better.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  And then he's saying that whatever the matter you speak of on my account, you may attend to as you say. Because I fear I shall be unable, right? So, you know, this as well, this vignette did not come in response to, obviously, an ad detachment interview question, you know? So here we would ask around his thoughts and feelings around the time of her death. Have they changed over time? And looking for semblance of RF in some of that as a way of understanding his grief process. So I think I would give this a three, somewhere around around there.

• 31:53David Puder?

  Okay.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  On RF.

• 31:55David Puder?

  Okay. The the interesting thing I find in this is that with something that's more poetic, it's it's really like, can I evoke in you an understanding of what's going on inside of me? Right? And I think he he does a good job of evoking that he is in a really dark place and it's a hopeless place. Right? But yeah, there's it's lacking some things. So what I did was I, in my own brain now, and this has never been revealed before. So this is the first time y'all are hearing this. I tried to increase it not completely, but a little bit. Okay? And so we're going to read that now and see where we go from here. Okay?

• 32:38David Puder?

  So Anne's death initially profoundly overwhelmed me. And I was the most miserable of men. I was so profoundly miserable that if you were to distribute my feelings to the whole human family, there would not have been one cheerful face. I felt incredible guilt for the death, despite my understanding I could not have prevented it. The guilt was thick. I knew irrational, but tied my gut into knots and left me feeling sour and sick. I, at one point, remember my dad punishing me for my scholarly ambitions.

• 33:21David Puder?

  He wanted a farm worker, and I was a reader. And I remember it was better to suppress my anger, to prevent further rage from him. And I would be punitive for my love of reading, but also knowing that I was not bent to be a farmer. I found myself guilty at my fleeting anger towards God, bitter, rageful, pounding my fist into the air, but then pounding my fist on myself as well for being angry, likely also remnants of how I had to stuff the anger growing up. I moved through the anger eventually more to just pure sadness, accepting I had lost

• 34:06David Puder?

  the love of my life, a perfect angel, grief, heavy, thick, but also an air of resoluteness to incorporate the best parts of her, of how I remember her, into my way of being.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  So, well done, David, for increasing Abraham Lincoln's RF here. I think we could go through it and point to the places of a higher RF. One of the things that I didn't mention in the first clip is that there was reference to his mental state, but not much using mental state terminology. And that's where the increases come here. So, the profoundly overwhelming already suggests something of that mental state. This next, "but I was so profoundly miserable that if you distribute it in mine," is more or less the same. But then he says, "I felt incredible guilt," right?

• 35:03Speaker 01

  So, naming that as a mental state, and then he ties it for the death, right? So, there's an understanding of how...

• 35:14Speaker 01

  How that mental state came about in terms of what it's tied to as this actual event? And then he says, despite my understanding, I could not have prevented it. Right? So there's a very high sophisticated RFPs. Right? So he's saying that I have an understanding about the way mental states work. And despite my knowing at some conscious cognitive level that I was not responsible. It went so deep, I couldn't shake it off. I still, I recognize, I felt that guilt. Now, if somebody says that, they've already done some work on that guilt. Right? It's the person who is unaware of this mechanism or this connection that would be lower RF.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Right? So if you, you know, they could, you still use the word guilt. I felt really guilty. You know, because I really think that, you know, I should have taken better care or had I not gone on a trip just then. You know, whatever, without really acknowledging that that guilt is misplaced. Or that I understand, he's saying, I understand why I felt guilty. And no matter what I do, I can't shake that is a window into his inner world, especially around mental states. The guilt was thick. I knew rational, but tied my gut into knots and that left me feeling sour and sick.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Here's another point that he gets another kind of check on the reflective functioning scale around understanding how a mental state impacts physical, the physical body, right? So alluding to some kind of mind-body piece. It's another way of explaining to the reader or the audience here, this is how bad it is. Right? Like he's also very in touch with how this might land in terms of, you know, I'm sharing with you. This is how it felt in my body to let you know how devastating all of this was. Then he brings in this point around his father punishing him. And the discrepancy between his father's vision for him, which was to be a farmer,

• 37:19Speaker 01

  and his own individual wishes of what he would be, which is more scholarly. He was a reader. And then he knew himself well enough. He knew that I was not, I didn't have the bent to be a father, a farmer. That's an interesting slip. And then he says, I felt myself guilty and my fleeting anger towards God, even to the point where.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  He's raising his fist to the air and then raises it to himself, right? Like, so he's aware of the process and able to track those feelings, right? So he's feeling anger. He projects it onto God, I guess, for having his father not understanding him from an early age, as well as what happened to his wife. And then even understands how he turned that anger onto himself. And that's an early version of how we think of depression within psychedelic theory around its aggression turned against the self. And then he says, I moved through the anger eventually. So that's another check on the RF scale. He's giving us some kind of developmental perspective,

• 38:25Speaker 01

  both in his reference to himself as a child, but also this process. What was it like for him to move through the anger, rather than just pure sadness, accepting that I'd lost the love of my life? There's a little bit of idealization there with a perfect angel that comes in. But then his wish to grieve in a way that was efficient or accurate and remember her into his way of being, that's also a little bit aspirational. But he is looking to where this might end up.

• 38:59David Puder?

  Okay, so what score do you give it?

• 39:02Speaker 01

  So this one is more, I think, in a five, in the five range.

• 39:06David Puder?

  Okay. And yeah, I left in a little bit lower RF by some idealization, right? And I was trying to tie, I was trying to tie the depression to some deeper developmental themes that were true for Abraham Lincoln. His father notoriously would get really angry at him when he was not farming and reading instead of farming. So I tied that in. So yeah, it's good. So, okay, this is a five.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  I'm gonna survive.

• 39:37David Puder?

  This is, this is good. I think, okay, so here's my attempt to increase this more. Worked on this last night. Okay, at first I saw her as a perfect angel. And for years I idealized her as perfection. So just to let the audience know, I'm kind of, I'm kind of leaving most of the first part. Right. But this is kind of an add on. So it's like, imagine that last part was still there, but this is kind of an add on. Okay. Eventually with time, I realized Anne had many strengths. She was intelligent, attractive and lively. But in retrospect, a lot of my emotions were based on youthful passions. And I did not know her as well as I might have imagined, which led to project angelic qualities on her.

• 40:20David Puder?

  I also think our co-interest in learning contrasted sharply with my father's dismissal and even physical abuse towards my desire to learn. Perhaps her dying before her youthful ideal could grow into loving each other's imperfections. That ideal twisted the knife of my pain all the more. I can never fully know what she might have felt, the terror of the typhoid fever. I imagine in part she was horrified by the prospect of death, sadness of leaving her family, sadness of leaving me before we could have our own family.

• 41:00David Puder?

  And seeing her in such, so much psychic pain was itself misery for me. I am telling you this feel, some inadequacy to explain how horrible I felt. And worry, you might judge me for being so depressed for so long. But now I have compassion for the dark space I was in during that time after her death. She was my first love. I allowed myself to love with my whole and unguarded heart. And I felt life came to an end for a while. I was a ghost wrapped in profound thought, indifferent, going about my work.

• 41:40David Puder?

  I also sometimes will meet men who are in a similar place and sit in their profound sadness and feel for them, knowing what it was like for myself to go through it. Somehow that brings me meaning to share in their agony.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  So on the one hand, we have some increases or there's some parts of this where we could point to aspects of higher RF.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  Although I think David, you might have gone too far in keeping with the poetic kind of flavor and that could bring RF down.

• 42:21David Puder?

  Okay.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:22David Puder?

  So go ahead.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  So I think that that's also important. There's something often very crisp and to the point when someone has very high RF. And you know, this is you are trying to write in the style of Lincoln way back when in terms of the stature and that way of writing. But one wants to be clear about they're trying to get this message across and some of the flow, flowery language, the overly poetic, actually distances one from his experience as you try and kind of track it.

• 42:58David Puder?

  So. Okay, yeah. Walk, walk, walk me through it. Walk me through it.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  Walk you through.

• 43:02David Puder?

  I want, I want your truth. I don't want your, uh.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:05David Puder?

  You don't need to.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  No, I think that's, it's helpful that it's not just, you know, um, I'm almost thinking here like of an AI version, you know, let's put this bit of prose in, tell chat GPT, increase RF, it might do something, you know, like this. I also think, cause I'm thinking about AI in this context a lot, how different it is to say, do an AI or to look at some material like this in terms of having it resonate with how we feel that if you just did the chat GPT thing, you'd have no access to.

• 43:37David Puder?

  Hmm.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  So there's something in the pondering of this word versus that word or this experience versus that experience that drives our clinical intuition and our, um, some of the ways which we can't even put words to our understanding about another person. But that's that would be the goal that why a therapist doing something like an AI might prove so valuable in a therapeutic context. So I think the use of at first in this is does get a check on the mental state side of things in terms of they're orienting you towards time, right? There's some kind of developmental perspective.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  At first means when I first met my wife and that he saw her as a perfect angel and that even moves beyond that first point to the years after where I idealized her as perfection. That's all high RF, you know, that that he can now, looking back, what his first impression was and that it stayed that way. And he uses the word idealized. It's kind of a self derogating word, but he is he is conveying that I've gone through some kind of process. And then he says, eventually with time. So there's another reference to a process over time. I realized that she had many strengths and he lists them, intelligent, attractive, blind,

• 45:01Speaker 01

  but in retrospect, a lot of my emotions were based on youthful passions. So he's also saying the impact of those first impressions and who she was changed, right? And that he's looking back and saying that was, you know, part of I can put my I can understand myself at that point. I was younger, these youthful passions, but that they might have actually gotten in the way of knowing her, right? I did not know her as well as I might have imagined, right? So that's a very sophisticated RF, right? Saying because of those youthful passions and that initial, you know, rose colored glasses view, whatever, but that actually got me in the way of actually knowing who she was,

• 45:46Speaker 01

  which led to project angelic qualities on on her, right? So, uh, yes, I mean.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  This is what someone who knows something about RF would also go that next mile, right? How his ideas about her projected onto her, right? So that he couldn't kind of see her clearly. And then he talks about things we shared in common, the learning, and that was in contrast to his father's own dismissal and even physical abuse towards his desire to learn. So he's now comparing what it was like and why Anne was so important to him because she was a contrast of the way his father was. So again, he brings in some kind of developmental perspective. Perhaps her dying before our youthful ideal could grow into loving each other's, that

• 46:37Speaker 01

  sentence, I thought was overly poetic and takes us away from the essence of what he's trying to convey because it doesn't actually give us more information. He's giving us, he in fact goes back to his idealization with this, you know, that we could grow into loving each other's imperfections, that ideal, there's something, it doesn't help us in the RF. So we might want to mark that with a bit of, you know, might highlight that with yellow and a question mark. If he continued in this way with much more of that, it would lower the RF score.

• 47:15David Puder?

  And let me justify my, my attempt here, okay? My attempt was thinking if, if he had this ideal when, when she died, I think it, it almost was a part of the death of the ideal. The grief, the grief was not for the real person, it was for a part of the ideal, part of the, the connectedness that he felt with her in the midst of their, their mutual interest in learning, you know, which was kind of like a redemptive healing compared to the father's, you know, abuse towards him when he was learning. And so I think, I think what I was trying to say here was that, could he be, could

• 47:59David Puder?

  he be imagining that part of her dying in the midst of the ideal magnified it, right? Where it's like,

• 48:08David Puder?

  Like it was the it was the ideal that magnified the pain anyways. Maybe not though, maybe that, does that make sense?

• 48:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think he gets a little credit in terms of, you know, thinking about how he might feel in the future. But it was it was a little too subtle, and I think that the poetic piece puts some distance from being in touch with the mental pain, actually. Like, it's a bunch of, you know, it's it's these are images, flowery words. Twisted the knife of my penal. Yeah, it doesn't add that much more to what was there before.

• 48:46David Puder?

  Okay, fair enough.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  And then we get, I can never fully know what she might have felt. So that's a higher rough point, right? That the the nature of someone else's mental states are not visible to us. And even puts himself in her shoes when she had this typhoid fever and trying to imagine what she felt like, including her mental states around that. So not just what she would have felt like in terms of the physical part, but the specificity around her sadness at leaving her family, sadness at leaving him before they could have had their own family, as well as her seeing his sadness would have made her sad. So all of that is higher RF?

• 49:31David Puder?

  Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I was thinking, I got to the end of this and I was like, yesterday, I was like, no, I haven't really put my mind in what that was like for her dying. So it's like all about him. And so I was like, okay, what were all, what would be the potential reasons that this would be painful for him to see her suffering too? And her losses, like he wasn't just having his own loss of her. He was a witness to her loss and losses in the midst of her death. Yeah, so. Okay.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  And then I in telling you this feels some inadequacy to explain how horrible I felt. Right. So he's also letting you in on his mental state around this in terms of, you know, even by telling you this, I'm not getting anywhere near how how bad this was. And where you might judge me for being so depressed for so long. Right. So he's also putting himself in your shoes, the interviewer shoes, by saying, I'm worried about how you're gonna see me with all of this. He says, but now I have compassion for the dark space I was in during that time after a death. So he's now saying he's got some self compassion for himself.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  If that was a period, he'd get more RF points. Because now he's he's going off into, again, she was my first love. I allowed myself to love with a whole and unguarded heart. And I felt like life came to an end for a while. I was a ghost. It kind of trails off into almost an absorption with his thinking about her rather than, you know, a clarity of being able to, you know, say, stop. He said enough. And it actually it detracts rather than adds.

• 51:26David Puder?

  Interesting.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then the reference to the ghost, I was a ghost, I was ghost.

• 51:32David Puder?

  You know, here's my here's my thought process. Okay, let's go back to the good I did here. So in telling you this feels some inadequacy to explain how horrible I felt and where you might judge me for being so depressed for so long. You know, first of all, someone with a more depressive personality, they are very acutely sensitive to the to the person that's they're telling the story to. Right. And they may feel a sense of internal judgment and project that judgment on to someone else, right? That that you may judge me, right? Which probably the the reader is not judging him. But that could that could be a little bit of a of an RF mistake.

• 52:15David Puder?

  But the the the higher RF person is actively trying to is actively imagining.

• 52:23David Puder?

  The experience of the other, right? Like even the person that they're telling the story. So in the AI, for example, if if someone pauses and imagines what you might be thinking or feeling as the person giving the AI, that's higher RF, right?

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. We also take into account the relationship with the interviewer.

• 52:45David Puder?

  Yeah.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  Especially, yeah, including trying to enlist the interviewer's empathy for their perspective and get them on board with it.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  In a way that is doing something for them, you know, like, wouldn't you agree that was a terrible thing for a mother to do, you know, is is a sign of lower RF. But some sense of an individual never heard your story. So what is it that you wish to share to convey an image in their mind about what it was like for you?

• 53:16David Puder?

  OK, say this again. So if the, how can you lower your RF by noticing the interpersonal or by the projection of the interpersonal in the in the midst of the AI?

• 53:28Speaker 01

  So I think, you know, because the beauty of the AI is paying very, very close attention to the use of language. Right? And that there's a bit around, you know, give evidence for what you say. So evidence isn't just the words, but it's often discreet memories or incidents is the way to give evidence for what you say. And you're in a situation where you have your own mind that incorporates or encapsulates reflective functioning and your attachment story. You're trying to convey that to another person. So being somewhat conscious that they don't know your story, what is it you wish to share with them?

• 54:10Speaker 01

  And at the same time, we have a whole set of defensive maneuvers that are trying to protect you from being too in touch, perhaps, say, with your mental pain. So you have an idea of what happened, right? He's suffering here from the loss of his wife. But these added words take him somewhere away from being totally in touch with that pain. So it looks like, you know, more flowery words about what it was like is consolidating that image, but it actually takes you further and further away from the crisp beginning bits around what that experience was like. So when you pile on all these other words, it diffuses the message rather than enhances it.

• 54:52David Puder?

  Interesting. That's good. Okay, so what would you, what would you score this passage? Knowing all that?

• 55:02Speaker 01

  I'm pretty stingy with my scoring often.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  And we would be looking at a whole interview, not just that, but if we looked at this passage, I don't know that I would go much higher than a six. Five and a half or six because of that slightly too poetic, taking away from the essence of the meaning.

• 55:24David Puder?

  That's good. Okay, I appreciate that.

• 55:28David Puder?

  Okay, so next I have some Theodore Roosevelt. I thought I would just look at these little chunks, okay? And ignore how I scored it. So

• 55:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 55:40David Puder?

  "I was a sickly, delicate boy. I had to make my body."

• 55:46David Puder?

  So just that little statement.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  I don't, I, I think

• 55:51David Puder?

  It's pretty low. Okay.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  It's low, like two?

• 55:55David Puder?

  Okay. "I wished to preach not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life. That highest form of success which comes to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil."

• 56:15Speaker 01

  Hmm, I'd also not give it more than a one or two.

• 56:20David Puder?

  Okay, "And there were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at first, but by acting as if I was not afraid, I gradually ceased to be afraid."

• 56:34Speaker 01

  So that's getting a little bit better. I think the lack of specificity or an example about what those kinds of things

• 56:43Speaker 01

  Are makes it remain very vague, including I gradually cease to be like I would need a little bit more there in terms of so, for example, I was first afraid of, you know, what was going on in the opposition or whatever. And then I learned that if I would just put forward my views, which I felt to be true, or what I cease to be afraid. And that was more efficacious for me. But I think just the lack of specificity here of example, one doesn't really know exactly what he's talking about, except that he was afraid before and now he's not. Yeah.

• 57:23David Puder?

  So pretty low RF still. Okay.

• 57:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:26David Puder?

  So there was, um, there was a death and then he wrote in his journal, a big X. And he said, the light has gone out of my life. Okay. There was a death. I think his, um, yeah. So he, he wrote, the life has gone out of my life in a diary entry, February 14th, 1884, marking the devastating personal tragedy. His wife, Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt, and his mother, Martha Bullock Roosevelt, both passed. Uh, his wife died of kidney failure, just two days after giving birth to their daughter, Alice. His mother Martha

• 58:10David Puder?

  passed away earlier, the same day from typhoid fever. Okay. And so he wrote that in his journal. And so I did my attempt to increase his RF regarding this event. And I think this was the only time I did it. Yeah. So here we go. At the moment I recorded the bleak X signaling the unbearable grief over losing Alice and my mother, I did not yet grasp why I compulsively thrust myself into relentless activity. But now reflecting deeply, I understand that distracting myself with activity were forged early in my childhood. Struggling with severe asthma, I learned through.

• 58:54David Puder?

  My parents' persistent encouragement, praise and affection that vigorous action, resilient and cheerfulness were the surest routes to approval, security and self-worth. My father's proud insistence that I must overcome weakness through relentless physical effort, combined with my family's enthusiastic celebration of courage and optimism, shaped my personality to instinctively flee vulnerability through incessant motion and energetic productivity. Thus, when confronted by profound loss and helplessness, I instinctively retreated into ceaseless action, not merely to escape grief, but to unconsciously reaffirm my

• 59:36David Puder?

  deepest internal lesson that strength, achievement and vitality alone could ward off the unbearable fear of weakness, loss and despair.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  We had some very poetic presidents.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so he gets, there is a lot to get credit. I think, again, the overly poetic language distracts and diffuses the power of the RF-ness, if you want to think of it that way. So he is being able to go back in time at the moment I recorded that bleak X. And the bleak X is both commenting on how he perceived it, but perhaps also how other people might perceive that. And he put that together. That was my way of describing the unbearable grief over losing house and mother. I would put a period there rather than a comma because the long run-on sentences

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  are often indicative of an overactive RF stance that takes, you know, rather than the Chris. So if we put a period there, I did not yet grasp what I can possibly, yeah. So I did not yet grasp would get high.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  Why I compulsively thrust myself into relentless activity. And but now, so and then you put the word in reflecting, thinking, oh, that'll get me some good high RF points, which it doesn't necessarily. I understand that distracting myself with activity were forged early in my childhood. So there's a little bit too much going on here. That that is like an overactive, you know, trying to make sense of one's experience. But there's just too much there. That actually diffuses that capacity rather than shows it even more so. So he's saying that he did link his relentless activity with that being a way of distracting

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  himself and that it came somewhere from childhood.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  So that's why if we had a period.

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  Say after the activity and then he explained that part. But it's like one thought just bridging all the time to yet another element. And then we get to the asthma. It's it's not say the the clear crisp focus that you might want to see in the highest RF. Because it's it's yeah, it's it's a little overboard.

• 1:02:14David Puder?

  Yeah, and that's that's OK, because we're like my I'm not I was, yeah, we're not trying to make a perfect.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  No, it's all OK. And people speak this way. There are people that, you know, not exactly like this. I think there is something about the.

• 1:02:27David Puder?

  I think what I think what I was trying to do in this passage was to explain like kind of that hypomanic personality that he embodied, which has aspects of denial, but then a thrust into activity. So after the death of his, you know, wife and mother, he spent, I think, two years just kind of hunting and farming and really just action. Right, so it's it's like my attempt to put into words.

• 1:02:57David Puder?

  Like the why underneath his behavior.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  I guess I would like almost want to challenge you rewrite this.

• 1:03:05David Puder?

  Okay.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  With half the amount.

• 1:03:09David Puder?

  Okay.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  And pull out of it what you think are the key parts of how he achieved high RF. So there is the developmental perspective there. He's saying it's something that is tied to his childhood. He's saying that within himself, his personality around the relentless activity was in response to that. But like, for example, my father's proud insistence, like that in and of itself could be unpacked. That would give us more clarity, for example, saying, I understood that my father was very proud at my perseverance and the way in which I showed that I was really working at overcoming my weakness.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  And he knew that by my relentless physical effort, period. Yeah, because then it goes off into combine with enthusiastic celebration of courage and optimism. We don't know what that is. In some ways, that's just words, like about what. And then he's saying that shaped my personality to instinctively flee vulnerability through incessant motion and energetic, like it's just lacking specificity. We don't know exactly what he's talking about. So that was, you know, it was in that year that I ran my first marathon, or I don't know, whatever

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  the equivalent would be, like something that ties it not to the kind of lofty language, but actual experiences.

• 1:04:38David Puder?

  Right, right, right, right. It's like, okay, so yeah, sometimes in the like adult attachment interview, it's like you have these, these, these words, like, you know, what is the word to describe your relationship between you and your mother? And then what's the example, right? And then the why might be why they might have been behaving that way.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:01David Puder?

  And so in this, it's more, it's too fast almost. It's like, well, what, what do you mean he was enthusiastic of your courage? So if instead he said, like, when I ran a marathon, my father was so enthusiastic that I pushed through the pain. And that, that was how I got attention from him. Maybe that would be better?

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:24David Puder?

  Like how I got connection.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  I think we are looking for more succinct and the examples really often do illustrate that evidence for that way of thinking. That just the but otherwise is a bunch of words and it's very hard for the reader or the person you're talking to to have some sense of what what was really like for him. One gets a little bit of a sense, but I think with some of those specific examples, you'd get a much deeper sense.

• 1:05:57David Puder?

  Okay, that's good.

• 1:06:01David Puder?

  So.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  But it's often, you know, it's often not done, like, you know, giving yourself credit here for, or I'm giving credit for the creativity to look at something in the public domain, a very personal, you know, part of a relational perspective from these two presidents as a way of illustrating this. So I don't think that's been done before.

• 1:06:24David Puder?

  Yeah, I think it's kind of fun, you know?

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:27David Puder?

  It's kind of fun. Because one thing I've I've realized from reading biographies after learning this and kind of thinking about it a lot is you'll have a good biographer will increase the RF of the person in a way that the person, maybe their writing wasn't high RF. I don't know if you've thought about that.

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's through the lens with which we see the world, right? And and almost the kind of gestalt where we're putting things together and not realizing what our bias is, right? So if you're doing the biography of someone you really admire, you know, that might slip in, right? Because.

• 1:07:06David Puder?

  Or or maybe the biographer explains the why better than the person knew themself. Maybe that's what I'm saying. So it's like there the biographer is pulling together all of the threads of where how they arrived at where they arrived in a way that the person themselves couldn't have even described.

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  Right. Yes. And and and, you know, we know that in that kind of writing, there is a lot of bias.

• 1:07:32David Puder?

  Okay.

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  And and and, you know, I think that probably

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  we evaluate.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  Those biographies differently, you know, the ones that come out and we don't recognize the person, for example, in it, that they've gone so far, you know, is a little, is a little too far, but you can't, you can't separate out the writer of the thing from the person, you know, it's, it's part of how they're writing and how they're portraying that person to us. I mean, it'd be interesting to see if, you know, positive perspectives versus negatives, because there's also biographies on terrible people. And, you know, do we then diminish their RF? Because, and maybe some of them, you know, have very, very high

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  RF, putting it to evil use, for example, but maybe know exactly how to get at people because their RF is there. Usually, we think of it as being in the empathy, compassion, the positive features of individuals. But I think some of the, you know, evil people as well often have an inkling on how to be cruel in that way, and that, you know, but we wouldn't want to call that high RF, but there's something of a similar process potentially.

• 1:08:50David Puder?

  I've been thinking about this. Okay, so let's, let's kind of slow this down right here then. If you were morally bankrupt, right, like, like, and it seems like you would score lower on RF just from the self-focus, the, you know, you being the center of your own language, but do you feel like these are very different, separate domains? Like, a sense of like morality, evilness, you know, someone who's maybe sadistic would have a degree of desiring omnipotent control and, you know, they would have narcissistic features and Machiavellian features, but would that be high RF?

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:09:34David Puder?

  You know, what do you think?

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  I think for the most part, we would want to maintain that, you know, high RF does go with someone with compassion and empathy and being able to put themselves in someone else's shoes. And so the definition of those that are morally bankrupt and doing ill or harm to others is, is not being able to do that. So we have a paper with Peter Fonagy from a long time ago that looked at adolescent harassment interviews and RF in individuals who are incarcerated.

• 1:10:04David Puder?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  And the ones that got the lowest of all were those that committed crimes against another human being, you know, like assault, like rape, that kind of thing versus more kind of white collar crime or where nobody in their mind actually got hurt, like a theft from somewhere, they wouldn't even notice. Or where you're not actually in the moment, putting yourself in the other person's shoes, this, you know, or what's, what's wrong. But to hurt another individual, you, you can't really do that from a high RF perspective. You know, like at, at some level, you can't really put yourself in someone else's shoes and then do terrible things to them.

• 1:10:48David Puder?

  I've been reading about Epstein quite a bit. I'm a little bit down that rabbit hole and, you know, it seems like

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  I'm sorry.

• 1:10:55David Puder?

  Yeah, I, I, I feel like I need to cut myself off at this point, actually. I felt that several times in the past week of like, okay, today I'm done. I can't, I can't, you know. But there were, there were portions where he is telling, for example, Bill Gates, how to run the nonprofit meeting. And he says things to Bill Gates, like, you know, when you run this and these, you're talking to these donors, try to listen to what they desire, how they want their money to be spent and you are facilitating their desires more than you are, you know, bringing them into your vision. So it's like, how do you capture their own vision? So he's like, in another letter, he's, he's saying to someone, did you read the books

• 1:11:39David Puder?

  I gave, I recommended on deception? Now, I couldn't, I couldn't find those books, right? But. And then you see him also subtly lying in a way to make himself seem more powerful in emails. You know, he would say, he would drop name drop, you know, in ways that he actually wasn't connected to certain people, but he almost like inferred that he was pulling the strings to get, to get off, you know, more sexual control over some females, for example. And so there's, in this one email to this female, he's, he's alluding that he has pulled the strings for these two models that are doing so well. And if only she would

• 1:12:23David Puder?

  listen to him and do whatever he says, you know, that's, that's when he will, you know, help this person obtain the highest levels of success. Right? So he's pulling the strings, but he, to do that, you kind of have to know the mind of another. Right? So is that reflective function? But then also you're, it's kind of like, um, or does he just know dark psychology? You know, does he know it? You know, so what do you, what are your thoughts there?

• 1:12:52Speaker 01

  I was thinking of him, but you know, it's, he's now in the public domain and in such a crazy way. And every day we hear, every day we hear someone else that he's connected to. And some were thinking, how did he do it? You know, like, what was it? And I think there was this, you know, darker use of being able to understand the other and, and use that in very horrible and evil ways. Right? So I think somewhere, like if we talked to him, and I think that there was, somebody wrote about how he was not remorseful at all about all that he did, you know? And so there we saw the very lack, you know,

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  that kind of callous behavior that we see in extreme, you know, criminals, for example, that callousness was also at work. So I think if we, you know, look at what it was that he had that RF, but he put it to such an evil use that overall, we would hope that we, he would get, you know, a zero or minus one. But I think in How he got to where he got to often was being able to at least maybe it was pseudo RF, but he understood something very important about how powerful it is for people to feel like he understood them, he was on their level, that he had their best interest at heart, all of those, but I don't feel that's authentic RF.

• 1:14:19Speaker 01

  It was using that strategy for evil.

• 1:14:24David Puder?

  Hmm, you know, okay, so maybe, maybe what you said there makes sense to me in terms of like, okay, if he, if he was harming people, right? And he wasn't experiencing the, the why of his harming people. I think that would be low RF.

• 1:14:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:39David Puder?

  So it's like, well, why do you want omnipotent control? And why do you want power over these people? And like, what is, what is driving you, you know? And, and instead of that being a conscious thing that he's aware of, it seems like he just acts upon it and continually moves to increase his power, right? In all circumstances.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  And, and couldn't curtail any of it. I mean,

• 1:15:00David Puder?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:01Speaker 01

  The absolute ridiculousness of how broad this one.

• 1:15:04David Puder?

  Right.

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  Is just, you know, is just astounding, you know? And I think that's partly why we can't stop looking, as you're suggesting, in going down these rabbit holes, is that there's a wish to understand, you know? And in awe of him at, at some level as well, you know, that it's, you know, there, there's, there's no, there's no part of our society that he didn't reach, you know? From sports stars to leading academics to high tech, like it's, it's every, a prince who, you know, got arrested yesterday, like it's, you know, for the more common folks among us, it's like, you know, it's just fascinating.

• 1:15:44David Puder?

  I, I think, I think my own, like, like I tweeted out a couple of days ago, like, why is no one arrested? And finally, we're seeing some, and it's like, for me, it's more of that piece of like, where is the justice, right? I want justice, I want, you know, like, I, I mean, for me, it's like, I, I have spent the last 10 years talking to victims of sexual violence and, and helping them in therapy and helping them break off from narcissistic relationships and, you know, like trying to heal. And, and so for me, it's like this kind of disgust of.

• 1:16:23David Puder?

  Of like, this is just like revolting. I think there isn't, there is an interest in understanding psychopathy for me because I feel like so many of my patients have gone through and in my own journey have gone, touched on people with a level of psychopathy, sadism and psychopathy, where it's like, we, we so want to help everyone, but I'm not sure we're going to be able to help someone who's psychopathic, right? And so we need to be able to like differentiate in our own practice. How do we, how do we identify if someone is psychopathic and how do we keep some distance?

• 1:17:02Speaker 01

  Right? Yes.

• 1:17:04David Puder?

  So, so yeah, I was talking to a patient this morning and we were talking about like, okay, she, you know, if you can read the room, if you can understand what people want, is it always manipulative to give them what they want? And my, my thing to her was like, well, what's the, what is the reason to give them what they want? Are you trying to get something in for yourself for power, you know? And there's like the, the spiritual principle of like, don't let your right hand know what your left hand is doing when you give, right? So when you give a gift, try to like hide it from yourself almost, you know?

• 1:17:46David Puder?

  Don't give a gift in public to be appreciated by other people. And so if you give, if you, if you're able to read someone well and know what a good gift is, and you give that gift, you give it not to get something in return, but truly to give it to the other person as to bless them, you know? And then you almost try to forget the inherent maybe goodness of that, that you yourself have done this thing, right? Because that would be, you know, I don't, I don't know. Does that make sense? Like, so it's like-

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  It does make sense. It reminds me, there's a- eminent Jewish philosopher from many hundreds of years ago, Maimonides, who talked about levels of giving.

• 1:18:23David Puder?

  Okay.

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  You know, and the, you know, one of the lowest is somebody asks you and then you give.

• 1:18:30David Puder?

  Okay.

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  And then there's other ones where somebody tells you someone else needs and you give. So they might still know who gave it, but less. And then the highest is, you know, where the person has no idea. Right? And, and I think it's getting at that space around, they have no idea that you were the one who gave. Right? And then there's also, you don't know where it went. Like you give and it just in the trust that it'll, you know, go to the, the right kind of people. But that takes away from somewhere you still, I, I think that idea of like, tell yourself you didn't do this good thing. Is it, is it interesting when can we really, really do that?

• 1:19:10Speaker 01

  Or it's, it's, it's just saying, don't be so in, you know, thinking, oh, I'm an amazing person because look what I've done.

• 1:19:16David Puder?

  Right.

• 1:19:16Speaker 01

  And you get that when the person knows that it was you and you're expecting a thank you or whatever. But there's something that is, is coming through around. You give because you feel that's the right thing to do. I don't know if it makes you feel good. I'm not sure that that's necessarily a bad, a bad thing. But there's also so much theory of mine, like when you give to someone and they don't know who it is, you're putting yourself in their shoes. Like if you were needy and needed, would you want everybody to know that? No, you're protecting their self-esteem or whatever by not being kind of public or, or, or knowing. So I think there's, there's a lot in our thinking about motivation and why we do the things we do on that positive realm.

• 1:20:00Speaker 01

  And then when we look at Epstein and all those other elite people who did very bad things, you know, there's, there's something so irksome, I think, to the rest of us over, why would you think that this is okay and you can get away with it? And now we have our government here who's not arresting anyone as far as I can tell, as compared to in Europe, I think in Norway.

• 1:20:22David Puder?

  Yep.

• 1:20:22Speaker 01

  And in England now.

• 1:20:23David Puder?

  Yep.

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  But, but not here. Um, and whether that's, you know, to do with our current context. I'm not so sure some of this was available for many years and, and nothing was done.

• 1:20:37David Puder?

  Yeah, I um, I, I hope that the listener, I'm, I'm mentalizing the listener and I hope that you're not annoyed at me going into my own sort of peculiar interest here with Epstein, but I, I think it does illustrate this reflective function at its finest. It, it is both true to yourself, but it's also the, um, it's not, if it's bent, if, if you're, if the gift of psychological mindedness is bent towards your, towards a more of a sadistic, you know, power hungry thing, it could actually be a low reflective function version of psychological mindedness.

• 1:21:18David Puder?

  And I think that's the cool thing about reflective function is it catches actually a more selfish or self-oriented persona. And then the, um, my final thought was, uh, I saw this one email between Epstein and this guy and he's like, have you considered GHB for your insomnia or are you taking GHB? Which is, um, the date rape pill. So Epstein is alluding that GHB would be a good medication for sleep. And it's a powerful medication for sleep. Actually, they use it in narcolepsy, like very severe cases, right? Of, of narcolepsy. And it made me think like, you know, for some people, even if they're morally bankrupt, like they still have issues with sleep.

• 1:22:03David Puder?

  And there, I, one of my, um, I tweeted this out and one person tweeted back like, no, morally bankrupt people don't have issues with sleep. They sleep fine. And I actually looked it up and people higher in dark triad traits actually have worse sleep. There's, there's been studies on this. So maybe it can't, maybe they can be hiding it from themselves during the day, but at night it comes to them in nightmares and in troubling things. And this is where the hiding from themselves during the day is low RF.

• 1:22:34David Puder?

  What do you think?

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  It could be.

• 1:22:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it would be hard to know. I hope that they're, that they have nightmares at night for what they've done. You know, at least that would give us some kind of glimmer of hope. If there was some level of remorse, or is it so deeply hidden? That they're not even in touch with the connection between what would be disrupting their unconscious and their sleep? Yeah.

• 1:23:02David Puder?

  Yeah. Okay, so kind of bringing this to a close here. I know this has been a good, this has been a great dialogue. I've really enjoyed it. Anything still like lingering in your mind that you would want to say?

• 1:23:16Speaker 01

  Um, I think one of the things I would like to say is just knowing about how RF works from the research domain is very powerful within your clinical work. So whether you get trained fully on doing the AI, you know, which we, we love training clinicians. We have a AI training institute going on in July of this year on Zoom. But even if you don't do the full AI coding, being aware and familiar with the research and the theory of RF, I think can really change clinical practice.

• 1:23:49David Puder?

  Yeah, I think, I think it has, the more I, the more I understand it, the more I dig into it. And I think the other thing that is that AI may not be able to be the best at increasing your RF. Right? Because AI in and of itself is abdicating your own experience of the visceralness of your emotionality.

• 1:24:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:24:12David Puder?

  And the process is necessary to grow your RF. And this is where I think the, the interpersonal nature of things like transfer of soaps therapy is the, is something that increases RF or therapy that has an interpersonal aspect, right? Group therapy, that kind of thing as well. Where there's an interpersonal piece will probably be the closest thing because it's an authentic increase.

• 1:24:37Speaker 01

  Right. With authentic people, I mean, I don't know whether the bots could get so good at delivering therapy that, that they could do that.

• 1:24:45David Puder?

  It's, it's sycophantic, right? At the very nature, it's sycophantic. It, it caters to what people desire to hear, which is the problem.

• 1:24:56David Puder?

  Okay, well, I'll post in the show notes links to your training.

• 1:25:03Speaker 01

  Great.

• 1:25:03David Puder?

  And I know I've done the reflective function training with your husband. I think I might sign up for this AI training as well.

• 1:25:10Speaker 01

  Very good. We'd love to have you on board. It'll be fun.

• 1:25:14David Puder?

  And so, yeah, we will leave it there for today. Thank you so much for coming on.

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  Great. Thank you, David.