ABSTRACT
This chapter largely mirrors the topics addressed in the prior chapter, but this time the subject matter addressed is PA as an Interrelated Multidimensional Diagnosis. The incidence and estimates of PA are offered based on a reasonable sampling of the literature. As in Chapter 5, this chapter pursues the simplicity of the approach presented in Chapters 3 and 4, again noting the background and history of PA that leads to a proposal that describes its recognition and functioning as an Interrelated Multidimensional Diagnosis. Rooted in an examination of the literature, PA has been considered inclusively by way of contemplating the four main terms that are contemporarily described as PA in Chapter 3. The case is made dimension by dimension that PA is also an IMD. Tables are also provided and built on recurring accounts in the literature that are used to construct telling background; individual, system, and subdynamic characteristics; and symptoms in an interrelated fashion. It is further proposed that children who succumb to the pressures involved with PA are in fact changed, and who they are has changed in the fashion suggested by Anna Freud in her seminal piece on Identification with the Aggressor (2018/1936). With the emphasis on systems that the IMD concept affords, it is also suggested that cases may be exacerbated by legal systems. For this reason, the Family-Legal Systems Optional Subdynamic has also been proposed to address these circumstances as an additional point of analysis. The case is made that PA is a form of child abuse, and again the literature is used to clarify this assertion, which is generally well accepted. Using variable criteria, PA is separated from other pathologies and symptom presentations as a unique IMD that may be discerned by using a recommended triage process. Processes, that distinguish it from other maladaptive family system presentations such as Counter Productive Parenting, Parental Denigration, or Parental Estrangement. Anchored in these analyses and the descriptions in Chapter 4, a new way of approaching the diagnosis of PA as an IMD in suggested that incorporates both the stages of suspicion and further study as well as the method for making such determinations at a level of proof that is better than chance.
