For Rui Boy

It was our son Rui’s misfortune to be mothered by a woman who engaged in a campaign of denigration directed at me, and which Rui was witness to, even though his every personal experience with me was quite contrary to this campaign. Machiko Terauchi will deny until the day she dies that she did this; yet when I mentioned that I was concerened that she was consciously alienating Rui, and used the term parental alienation in 2009, well before  she got away with kidnapping Rui, she went into a paroxysm of  anger and pseudo-shock. It was evident that  in her research and social intercourse with other Japanese abductors  into how to go about abducting a child to Japan, Machiko had already encountered the term parental alienation, and was already defensively prepared in a way to hear it flung in her direction.

In this talk below, Amy Baker, who has become a principal spokesperson advocating for the recognition of the existence of parental alienation (as both a syndrome among children/ victims,  and a parental strategy) explains its basic functioning. For those who are not aware 0f her books, her work on behalf of children, and her research into the affective damage in adults whose childhoods were ruined by parental alienators, I offer these brief talks. Please share them, and educate the publics in which you are involved.

As a final note, it should be said here and again elsewhere, that alienation by an actively alienating parent, directed at the targeted parent, while terribly damaging and destructive of the child’s ability to formulate paradigms of healthy or loving relations with others based on trust, pales in comparison to those pathologies created by the absolute destruction of children’s trusted self/other structure of relationality as inflicted by parental child abduction. The disruption of identity formation and emotional selfhood that the abduction of a child from his parent inflicts upon a child is devastating in ways that have rarely been approached or described adequately by psychology, psychoanalysis or the legal, political frameworks that impinge upon or enable it. To say that the abduction of children is a form of state-supported criminality that is so devastating that the governments involved, such as those of the U.S. and Japan, are unable to deal with, discuss adequately, or manage the uncontrolled consequences is scarcely adequate to the agonizing reality of the issue. It remains to be seen whether there can ever emerge a framework that has the capacity to invoke the kind of protection from harm that children require in light of the international global abduction regime that is active between the Japanese state and parents today.