ABSTRACT
The social reality that confronts every child of divorce is that they have to find a way of integrating two sets of families with their different stories and heritage and in turn our psychological theories have also to find a way of thinking about the new configuration of family life and its effects upon the psyche. There is almost universal agreement between researchers that children are traumatized by divorce, so it would be unsurprising if this trauma and the arrival of stepparents was not a major feature of therapy from time to time. Most research suggests that the majority of children do recover from their bewildered sadness following a divorce, and that they do catch up emotionally with more securely attached children a bit later in life. The favoured method is to poison the children's affection towards the partner who has left and remarried.
