Mentalizing homeostasis: the social origins of interoceptive inference – replies to Commentaries

Our target article (“Mentalizing homeostasis: the social origins of interoceptive inference” – henceforth MH for short) drew a relatively large and varied set of responses from the invited commentators. These are a source of both delight and challenge. The delight stems from the fact that our interdisciplinary proposal regarding the social origins of interoception is met with wonderfully constructive, specifying and expansive responses across different fields, thus building a wider basis for a long-overdue dialogue between the fields. The challenge stems from the fact that to do justice to the variety and depth of some of the commentaries would require at least another, long and overloaded, interdisciplinary article. As our response cannot be as long, we selected three central facets of our proposal and discuss them in relation to the points raised by the commentators. In all three instances, we particularly focus on the following question: Does our proposal call for a reconsideration of existing concepts and findings as we and some commentators suggest, or are the phenomena we have highlighted best described by existing conceptualizations in the fields involved, as some other commentators claim? We will start from the most radical aspect of our proposal, namely the cognitive and emotional implications of caregiving at the time of the infant’s motor immaturity, before moving into the issue of embodied versus cognitive mentalization. We will conclude with somewhat lesser issues of terminology regarding the nature–nurture distinction and the self–other distinction.