The Medea Complex and the Parental Alienation Syndrome [View all]

[Bonobo]

I came across an article about what I think must surely be a phenomena that is massively underreported and probably extremely common on smaller scales. That is the mother's "brainwashing" of children to be against their fathers. How often do mother's co-opt their children to be allies on their sides against their mates? My sense is that it is probably epidemic. As a result of being absent more by necessity, and due to mother's closer bonds to children, enlisting them against their husbands is not difficult but its long-term affect on the emotional development of the child may be responsible for a huge amount of problems in adults mental states.
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http://www.mmpi-info.com/psychology-publications/medea.html

When doing custody evaluations, I am often struck by the frequency in which mothers aggress against their children's fathers by turning their children against him. In the process, they do great harm to their children. As a therapist, I am often struck by the resistance of patients who were brainwashed as children against a parent. I believe that brainwashing by a mother is both more common and more powerful than that of a father, since the child's bond with the mother is more intense and primitive. Such brainwashing and alienation usually leads to a life long problem with establishing and maintaining a healthy intimacy. Their mother's perception and definition of their fathers, if programmed at an early age becomes a core fundamental belief, and if questioned, the person's core sense of reality seems shaken; "If my mother lied to me about my father, then can I trust her love for me?" Thus there is a great deal of resistance to the awareness of having been brainwashed.

Fathers are very important to their daughter's feminine development. Biller's research review (1971) supports that girls who had positive relationships with their fathers were more likely to have satisfying heterosexual relationships. When a mother poisons her daughter's love of her father, she is also compromising her daughter's ability to maturely love any man. The mother is programming her daughter to be her ego extension without a will of her own, and to be with her and no one else, narcissistically bound.

Although both boys and girls are greatly harmed when they are turned against a parent, the harm is often different. Studies indicate that boys suffer the most harm when the boys are stuck with mothers who express hostility towards their fathers- the source of their male identity ( Hodges, 1991; Kelly,1993). This chapter, however, will focus only on the mother-daughter bond in the Parental Alienation Syndrome. Although the daughter's self esteem may not suffer as much as the son's, her ability to deal with separation and mature relationships with men is very deeply affected. Wallerstein's (1989) 10 year longitudinal study of girls from divorced families found that the nature of the mother-daughter relationship, and the daughter's identification with her mother were predictive of the daughters' ability to address the tasks of their relationships with men later on. Daughters who identified with hostile mothers had the poorest adjustment.