The concept of parental alienation as supported by professional journals from several disciplines
Björn Cedervall (a) and Sophie Roswall (b)
Björn Cederwall
The field of parental alienation, PA, now shows several criteria of a maturing science (Harman et al., 2022). This is also manifested by the types of peer-review journals which publish articles about the concept. We have identified 185 such journals which clearly show the interdisciplinary character of the field.
The aim of this work is to give an overview of the corresponding journals which focus on areas such as psychology, developmental biology, medicine including psychiatry in the context of family dynamic. This is not meant to dismiss the importance of legal aspects – indeed we found 47 peer-review journals which have dealt with legal aspects of the PA concept. The legal process, however, is dependent on the first step which is recognition of PA as a biological and medical issue. Therefore, it is of interest to analyze to what extent the PA concept has entered the area of medicine and biology: The total number of journals from the areas of biology and medicine we found sums up to 116. The number of journals which clearly intersect between the medical sciences and law are 9. We found 15 journals which cover social work or sciences and have published articles on the PA concept, 7 of these journals in turn overlap with medical or legal issues.
In summary, we find PA standing on a solid scientific ground which includes many fundamental psychological mechanisms that were established more than 60 years ago. We believe strongly that PA in most cases should be regarded as medical emergencies and therefore dealt with promptly whenever detected.
a) Associate Professor, PhD (Medical Radiation Biology, Faculty of Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden), MSc (Biochemistry & Nuclear Chemistry, Faculty of Chemistry, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)
b) BA (Transcultural Communication, University of Graz, Austria), BA (Criminology, Kristianstad University, Sweden), MSSc (Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden)