States of mind and metacognitive dysfunctions are different in the various personality disorders: a reply to Ryle

Our reply to Ryle concentrates on the following points: (1) we are not upholding a purely cognitive idea of the schema concept, but rather that individuals are driven by expectations that are open to being rewritten in the course of interpersonal relationships; (2) metacognition is not a purely theoretical activity, but includes an ability to simulate the other’s mind and is subject to variations in the course of interpersonal relationships; (3) there is clinical and research evidence supporting the idea that metarepresentative malfunctioning differs between one disorder and another and that it is not a case of a generic difficulty in self-reflection; (4) the individual states of minds are not special features of particular personality disorders (PDs) and do not distinguish a patient from a person without problems. The pathological element is that in the PDs the set of states is limited and an individual is unable to switch into states that are adaptive or free of suffering