Karen Woodall, a UK proponent of the parental
alienation (PA) construct, has outdone herself in her 29/7/23 blog post (https://karenwoodall.blog/2023/07/29/the-experience-of-induced-psychological-splitting-in-children-experiencing-parental-divorce-or-separation/).
She presents an attack on what she believes feminism to be, as if it were a
statement relevant to the evidence about PA. Feminism (as defined by Woodall)
is criticized, and via the usual PA method of abuse of analogies, Woodall
concludes that she has given a powerful argument in support of the PA belief
system. Has she managed this? Well, let’s look at some details.
First, let’s examine Woodall’s critical method. It’s a
familiar one—claiming that an opponent’s views are not only wrong but distorted
by their own emotional aberrations, which are easily identified and named, and
which prove that the opponent’s argument is dead wrong. Anyone who has seen
first-year university students at play will recognize this technique. Having
learned a list of terms describing psychopathology, students trot these out in
all disagreements and consider them to be quite telling tactics that
successfully make opponents furiously annoyed. The fact that the terms also
serve to darken counsel is ignored, as actual constructive discussion is not
the goal. The PSYCH 101 method is also common among proponents of controversial
experimental treatments; I saw this years ago during the behind-the-scenes
fight about Holding Therapy, when anyone who opposed the use of this dangerous
treatment was instantly said to be suffering from Reactive Attachment Disorder.
But Woodall does not seem to understand that using
this diagnosis-as-evidence approach just makes more competent opponents roll
their eyes with boredom and vicarious embarrassment. She seriously and
apparently shamelessly points to her antagonists in the PA discussion as
showing “denial”, “splitting”, “primitive defenses”—as if these statements,
even if true, had anything to do with evidence for or against PA. By using this
approach, of course, she is ignoring the requirement that practitioners of
psychotherapy have some contact with people before they offer a diagnosis. But
beyond that, she ignores the idea that the accuracy of a statement should be
assessed by observation and measurements of events, not by the characteristics
of the speaker. The reasoning problem Woodall displays here is ad hominem—or
ad feminam – argument; the stress is on irrelevant material about the
opponent that has no purpose in serious discussion other than to irk the
opponent.
For a second issue, let’s have a look at Woodall’s
attempt to attack feminism, or what she apparently thinks feminism is. It’s
perfectly true that feminism is an ideology—that is, it’s a statement of values
that does not necessarily include any description of the ways in which those
values should be applied. It’s my impression that Woodall does not understand
the values of feminism. Feminism simply states that girls and women are as much
human beings as boys and men are, and that all human beings deserve equal
dignity and respect from society. Woodall’s claim that feminism “splits” humans
into good women and bad men is simply untrue. Woodall, I think, has feminist values confused
with a matriarchalist approach in which women’s needs and wishes dominate
those of all other people. This is parallel, of course, to a patriarchalist
approach, in which men’s wishes have priority over those of women, girls, and
even boys. It’s very easy for people with an authoritarian bent to mistake the
values of feminism for those of matriarchalism, as authoritarian thinking
always assumes that someone must be owner and someone else be slave.
But let’s suppose that Woodall could in some way
demonstrate that feminist values are all wrong. What would be the conclusion to
draw from that? Woodall’s blog post seems to suggest that
there is some connection between the facts about feminism and the facts about
PA—but there isn’t. Woodall is setting up feminism as a “straw woman”. She
seems to believe that if she can make readers think badly of feminism, they
will also think that she has proved bad things about opposition to PA ideas.
Now, there’s a lot more that needs to be said about Woodall’s
arguments. Painful as it is, we need to have a look at the Tower of
Psychobabble she has constructed in this blog post and elsewhere. An
interesting place to start is with her citation of Melanie Klein. Klein, a
British psychoanalyst of the 1940s (give or take), was deeply committed to the
idea that observation of children’s behavior was of no use to efforts to
understand emotional development; instead, the appropriate technique was to
consider the fantasy operations of the infant psyche as they could be thought
of by analytically-trained adults. Such thinking yielded the idea that the
mother’s breast could be thought by infants to be either completely good or
completely bad, in a process described as splitting which could occur later in
development as well. Klein and her followers were strongly opposed to the
thinking of John Bowlby, who used observations of child behavior to develop the
concept of attachment and a plethora of empirical research on early emotional
development. Citing Klein allows Woodall to name a famous historical name but
in fact Kleinian ideas have not received any empirical support that connects
them with PA. (The Bernet work that appeals to “splitting” as an explanation is
highly questionable.)
Interestingly, Woodall drags attachment into her
discussion, as well as Kleinian concepts. She does this by citing the egregious
Craig Childress and his self-published claims about the role of attachment in
PA. Childress, like many who have incomplete mastery of attachment theory, believes
that the “attachment system” is easily manipulated and that a child far past
toddler age can have a switch flipped to make them feel attachment to a parent
they have been avoiding. The flipping is done by exposing the child to a
treatment called High Road to Reunification, as carried out by the high-school
graduate Dorcy Pruter. This treatment has never been tested and is in fact an
experimental treatment (as defined by Kaminsky and Clausen in 2017); it has
apparently often included transportation of children to the venue by youth
transport service workers. Childress nevertheless has claimed 100% success of
the treatment—a most unlikely outcome. (Woodall seems unaware of the downside
of citing Childress and may not know that he has been disciplined by two state
psychology boards.) In her blog post, Woodall shows her commitment to the view
that PA is an attachment issue by her reference to “attachment healing” as
facilitated by the treatment she uses.
There is much more to say about statements and
implications in this blog post. One is that Woodall assumes that “splitting”
can be and has been measured, so that she feels safe in saying that children in
PA cases show this tendency. Another is that Woodall suggests that if there
were “splitting”, it would have to be caused by the influence of the preferred
parent rather than by any of a myriad other factors in divorcing families. Woodall
also implies that any suggestion that fathers commit more domestic violence than
mothers is based on “splitting” the parents into good women and bad men,
whereas in reality statistics show that men are more inclined to DV than women
are, though no one has claimed that women never display violence; not all
population differences can be attributed to “splitting” even by proponents of
this psychological construct. Finally, Woodall suggests, without a clear
statement, that a parent who is alleged to have alienated a child is in fact an
abuser from whom the child must be removed and protected—a proof by assertion
borrowed from the U.S. PA proponent Jennifer Harman.
To sum up this too-lengthy critique of Woodall’s
thinking, then: an ignorant attack on feminism, however it is bolstered by
borrowings from psychoanalytic thought and attachment theory, does not constitute
evidence that supports the PA belief system. If Woodall or other PA advocates
want to show that their identification of PA is accurate or their treatments
safe and effective, they need to do this the old-fashioned way, by empirical
outcome research.