In the Name of the Child: A Developmental Approach to Understanding and Helping Children of Conflicted and Violent Divorce (2nd Edition)

In the Name of the Child: A Developmental Approach to Understanding and Helping Children of Conflicted and Violent Divorce (2nd Edition), Janet R. Johnston, Vivienne Roseby, and Kathryn Kuehnle. New York: Springer Publishing, 2009, 472 pp., $50.00 (hardcover)

OVERVIEW

Johnston and Campbell's groundbreaking publication Impasses of Divorce (1988) presented a dynamic, multilevel theory by which to order the data of highly contentious child custody/access (C/A) disputes. Impasses brought together several strands of mainstream sociology and psychology to analyze and illustrate homeostatic and synergistic processes that sustain and worsen unremitting, highly conflicted, oftenviolent attachments following separation and divorce. It remains unsurpassed as a model to understand, manage, assess, legally resolve, and treat the most chaotic family breakups.

Within Johnston and Campbell's nested ecological theory, formulation of a specific divorce impasse involves three mutually reinforcing levels of analysis. (1) On its innermost, ontogenic level are parents' "intrapsychic," sometimes characterological vulnerabilities to rejection, shame, loss, and insecure adult attachment. (2) The second, microsystem level, targets three former intimate partner "interactional" processes. (a) One can be observed in parent-couples' rigid patterns (e.g., habituated conflict, narcissistic wounding, recurrent or latent family violence, intense ambivalence alternating between fight/flight and fusion). (b) A second microsystem process occurs in the aftermath of separation-engendered crises (discovered infidelity, unprecedented spousal violence, or out-of-the-blue emptying of the family home or bank account). (c) Third, such blind-side assaults can precipitate traumatic breakups that generate monstrous-dangerous, threatening, frightening-"reconstructions" of the offending partner's persona. (3) The final level, an "external" macrosystem of supporters and advocates-extended kin, legal counsel, therapists, and judicial processes ("tribal warfare," protracted litigation)-ostensibly motivated by child protection and "best interests" hardens and further inflames parental hostility. By co-option or intrusion, parents, children, and others become caught, caught-up, and consumed in the postdivorce "crossfire."

Impasses of Divorce details several factors and toxic conditions most directly and immediately impacting corrosive emotions, cognitions, and actions of parents and other adults, which survive legal dissolution and produce "unsuccessful divorce." A decade later, Johnston and Roseby's In the Name of the Child (1997) shifted ontogenic focus to the experience and fallout for children, from infancy through early adolescence, of parents' unexamined and untreated personalities, relationships, and external system preoccupations.

The second edition of In the Name of the Child (Johnston, Roseby,...