COMMENTARY ON KELLY AND JOHNSTON'S "THE ALIENATED CHILD: A REFORMULATION OF PARENTAL ALIENATION SYNDROME" |
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| Authors: | Richard A Gardner |
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| Institution: | Richard A. Gardner, M.D., was a Clinical Professor of Child Psychiatry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. His long tenure there spanned 40 years, up to the time of his death in May 2003. In his over 35 years in private practice as a child psychiatrist and adult psychoanalyst he made many seminal contributions to the treatment of children. His contributions include the creation of the well-known The Talking, Feeling, and Doing Game, one of the first therapeutic board games for children, as well as several other games and testing instruments, all still in distribution. He also created the mutual storytelling technique, which therapists use in treatment with child patients. He was the author of more than 40 books and 300 articles covering a broad spectrum of topics relating to children and mental health, which encompassed self-esteem problems, conduct disorders, learning disabilities, divorce difficulties, and child sex abuse. His 1970 book The Boys and Girls Book About Divorce;initiated his long service of writing for children and parents, and later, mental health and legal professionals on issues of concern for divorcing families. In the early 1980s, he identified one of these issues as the parental alienation syndrome. In the ensuing years, he devoted himself to the arena of high-conflict child-custody disputes, serving as a court evaluator in more than 400 cases. He wrote more than a dozen books on evaluating child-custody disputes and differentiating between true and false child sex-abuse accusations, notably Family Evaluation in Child-Custody Mediation, Arbitration and Litigation, The Parental Alienation Syndrome, Therapeutic Interventions for Children with Parental Alienation Syndrome, and Protocols for the Sex-Abuse Evaluation. |
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| Abstract: | In a previous issue of this journal, Joan B. Kelly and Janet R. Johnston describe their reformulation of the parental alienation syndrome (PAS). Here, I present areas in which I agree with the authors and areas in which I disagree. Particular focus is placed on these PAS-related issues: the syndrome question, PAS versus parental alienation, the medical model, custodial transfer, gender bias, DSM-IV . empirical studies, and the misapplication of PAS. |
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| Keywords: | divorce child custody disputes parental alienation syndrome family divorce difficulties in |
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