http://81.96.84.131/webpub/fr/main/e...20PROCESS2.pdf
THE USE OF CHILDREN IN THE SEPARATION PROCESS:
PARENTAL ALIENATION SYNDROME.
ARTICLE FOR THE MAGAZINE LEX NOVA, OCT-DEC 2005
José Manuel Aguilar Cuenca. Psychologist.
At the beginning of the Eighties there began to occur a set of
inexplicable deaths that were to change the recent history of our
planet. Nobody knew the reasons for these deaths and as a result
different hypotheses began to be elaborated. In order to explain what
was happening, people began to speak of curses, lethal new drugs,
conspiracies by paramilitary groups or by government, even divine
punishment.
At the beginning of the Eighties AIDS did not exist. It was not to
be found in any medical textbook, international forums did not include
it as a subject of debate, there were no specialists to write books on it
and no government of the world considered that it had any duty to
allocate funds to support its victims. Today, as twenty years ago with
AIDS, Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS) is an evil barely understood
by the majority of those who work within the judicial ambit of our
country, and about which barely any information is available to those
paralegal professionals such as social psychologists, doctors and social
workers who must carry out the work involved. Nevertheless, every
year it is suffered by thousands of children, being responsible for an
unknown number of pathologies amongst them.
WHY DOES MY CHILD NOT WANT TO SEE ME?
The Royal Spanish Academy defines a lie as an expression or
statement contrary to that which is known, believed or thought, and
that to lie is to say, show or do the opposite of that which is known,
believed or thought. The psychologist Paul Ekman (1985) considers
that "two fundamental forms of lie exist: to hide and to falsify. The liar
who hides retains certain information without in fact saying what the
truth demands. The liar who falsifies takes an additional step: he not
only retains true information, but presents false information as if it
were true"i. The requirement to discriminate between what is real,
likely and therefore credible, and what is hidden and sometimes in
addition falsified, is the daily remit of the psychologist whilst carrying
out his work for courts and tribunals. It is a subject area which is
becoming more and more controversial.
Together with this, for some decades other ideas from outside
the legal domain have come to occupy space in the very area in which
professionals are working. This is the case with terms like
programming, brainwashing and alienation. To the concepts lie or truth
were then added those of reality and belief in reality, making
psychological investigation more complex, but much more welladapted
to what was happening in the area of family conflict.
Parental Alienation Syndrome is a disorder characterized by a set
of symptoms resulting from the process by which a parent transforms
the perceptions and attitudes of his or her children, by means of
different strategies, with the object of impeding, obstructing or
destroying their bonds with the other parent, until their feelings
become contradictory to those which would be expectedii. This
situation is directly related to the conflictive processes of separation
or, where separations have begun in mutual agreement, to their
subsequently turning into conflictive situations.
The first author to define PAS was Richard Gardner (1985),
Professor of Clinical Psychiatry of the Department of Infant Psychiatry
at Columbia University, in an article entitled “Recent Trends in Divorce
and Custody Litigation”iii. On revising the history of this syndrome we
can discover that the same essential ingredient has been described in
various ways, even parallel and without contact, by diverse authors
each of whom, on the basis of their own professional experience, has
in my opinion given a different name to the same phenomenon.
Wallersteiniv (1980) in California and Jacobsv (1988) in New York both
published information on cases which they classified as Medea
Syndrome - Medea Syndrome begins with a marriage in crisis and the
subsequent separation, and describes how the parents adopt the
image of their child as an extension of themselves, losing from sight
the fact that they are quite separate beings - whereas Michigan Blush
and Rossvi (1986) published a work in which they defined the
personality profile for parents who laid false accusations of sexual
crimes, defining the Syndrome SAID (Sexual Allegations In Divorce).
Finally, in the same year, Turkatvii described Divorce Associated
Malicious Mother Syndrome - malicious mothers are those who
successfully use the law to punish and to harass their ex-spouse, using
all types of legal and illegal means, with the aim of impeding contact
between child and father object.
All the previous works came to reflect facts that, in the course of
the investigation, have opened a path to understanding the different
situations to be found at the heart of the processes of separation and
divorce – and which professionals and parents need to know. The
assumption on the part of the children of the inherent biases, ideas
and injurious attitudes of the alienating parent is created by
manipulating their awareness, up to the point where the children feel
this negative emotion of repulsion from their mother or father as if it
were something they themselves had arrived at, a phenomenon
defined by Gardner as “the independent thinker”. At this point the
child has enclosed himself in a personality which he believes he has
created himself, in such a way that it is impermeable to the influences
of others, equipping himself with all the resources necessary to
maintain his system of values and beliefs with the object of isolating
any possible influences.
HOW TO MANIPULATE YOUR CHILD?
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