We know at PsychLaw.net that parental alienation (PA) is a serious mental condition that affects hundreds of thousands of children and families in the United States and comparable numbers in other countries. Mental health professionals (MHPs), family law attorneys, and everyday citizens observe PA on a regular basis, even if they do not know that the phenomenon has a name, where it comes from, or what to do about it. PA is not new. PA has been observed for many decades and has been described and discussed in the scientific literature of MHPs, in legal literature and precedents, and in popular literature – although the condition has been called a variety of names other than “parental alienation.”
PA is a mental condition in which a child – usually one whose parents are engaged in a high-conflict separation or divorce – allies himself or herself strongly with an alienating parent and rejects a relationship with the target parent without legitimate justification.
Several features of the definition should be noted. PA can be conceptualized as a mental condition of the child (e.g., the child has a false belief that the rejected or “target” parent is evil, dangerous, or not worthy of love) or an aberration in the relationship between the child and the rejected, target parent (e.g., absence of communication and camaraderie between child and parent, even though they previously enjoyed a loving, nurturing relationship). We refer to “separation or divorce” because PA often occurs prior to legal divorce and in families in which the parents were never married in the first place. PA may occur in high-conflict marriages when the parents are still living in the same household. It is essential to recognize that the child’s rejection of the target parent is without legitimate justification. If a parent was abusive or severely neglectful, the child’s rejection of that parent is understandable or legitimate and does not constitute PA. It is best to follow the convention of most writers, who use “estrangement” to refer to warranted rejection of a parent and “alienation” to refer to unwarranted rejection. Finally, we realize that the target parent may not be a typically “perfect” mother or father and that the target parent may have contributed in some way to the child’s dislike of him or her. However, the essential feature of PA is that the child’s rejection of the target parent is far out of proportion to anything that parent has done to justify the rejection.
In the last eight decades, various authors have described the phenomenon of PA, but have provided different names for it. For example, Wilhelm Reich (1945) wrote that many divorced parents defend themselves against what he called “narcissistic” injury by fighting for custody of their children. He found that parents who experienced narcissistic injury often defamed each other and did so in front of the children. Louise Despert (1953) said, “It is a sharp temptation for the parent who remains with the child to break down their love for the one who has gone” (p. 52). Jack Westman and his colleagues (1970) wrote that a “pattern is found in which one parent and a child team up to provide an effect on the other parent. … In these cases one parent appears to deliberately undermine the other through a child.”
Since the 1980s, many mental health and legal professionals in the U.S. and other countries have identified, described, discussed, and named the condition that we are calling “parental alienation.” The proliferation of names has led to confusion and, at times, disagreement among professional colleagues.Here are some examples in chronological order.
Janet Johnston and her colleagues (Johnston, Campbell, & Mayes, 1985) reported the “distress and symptomatic behavior of 44 children … who were the subject of post-separation and divorce disputes over their custody and care.” The authors described six primary responses of these children to their parents: “strong alliance,” “alignment,” “loyalty conflict,” “shifting allegiances,” “acceptance of both” with “avoidance of preferences,” and “rejection of both.” Their definition of “strong alliance” was “a strong, consistent, overt (publicly stated) verbal and behavioral preference for one parent together with rejection and denigration of the other. It is accompanied by affect that is clearly hostile, negative and unambivalent.” They wrote, “The child consistently denigrated and rejected the other parent. Often, this was accompanied by an adamant refusal to visit, communicate, or have anything to do with the rejected parent.”
Child psychiatrist Richard Gardner (1985) introduced the concept of “parental alienation syndrome” (PAS):
[Parental alienation syndrome refers] to a disturbance in which children are obsessed with deprecation and criticism of a parent – denigration that is unjustified and/or exaggerated. … The concept of the parental alienation syndrome includes the brainwashing component but is much more inclusive. It includes not only conscious but subconscious and unconscious factors within the parent that contribute to the child’s alienation. Furthermore (and this is extremely important), it includes factors that arise within the child – independent of the parental contributions – that contribute to the development of the syndrome.
Although Gardner never named the condition after himself, PAS has been called “Zespół Gardnera” or “Gardner Syndrome” in Poland.
Wallerstein and Blakeslee (1989) ome,” referring to the Greek myth in which Medea avenged the betrayal of her husband, Jason, by killing their two children.
Stanley Clawar, a sociologist, and Brynne Rivlin, a social worker (1991), published their monumental study, which had been commissioned by the American Bar Association. They used the terms “programming” and “brasuggested that some mothers could be “entangled with Medea-like rage.” Thus, the “Medea syndrinwashing” to describe the attitudes and behavior that causes PA. They said:
[One parent may] hinder the relationship of the child with the other parent due to jealousy, or draw the child closer to the communicating parent due to loneliness or a desire to obtain an ally. These techniques may also be employed to control or distort information the child provides to a lawyer, judge, conciliator, relatives, friends, or others, as in abuse cases. (p. 15)
Wallerstein, Kelly, Blakeslee, Johnston, Gardner, Clawar, and Rivlin were writing about the same children and the same clinical phenomenon. When Johnston wrote about the impact of polarizing parents in high conflict cases, she noted that “strong alignments are probably most closely related to the behavioral phenomena Gardner referred to as parental alienation syndrome” (1993). Kelly and Johnston (2001) subsequently renamed the condition “the alienated child” to focus clinical attention on the child rather than on the activities of the parents.In 1994, Ira Turkat argued that custodial parents engage in a variety of direct and indirect behaviors designed to alienate children from the nonresidential parent. Turkat argued that the result was that the children became preoccupied with unjustified criticism and hatred of the nonresidential parent (Turkat, 1994). He called the process “malicious parent syndrome” (Turkat, 1999). Warshak (2006) defined “pathological alienation” as:
a disturbance in which children, usually in the context of sharing a parent’s negative attitudes, suffer unreasonable aversion to a person or persons with whom they formerly enjoyed normal relations or with whom they would normally develop affectionate relations (p. 361).
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