Medea Complex
Parental Alienation Syndrome is frequently caused by the Medea Complex in divorcing mothers. P.A.S. is a mother’s revenge and aggression against her former husband by depriving him of his children and brain washing the children by programming the children to adapt the mothers negative perception and definition of their fathers. This programming becomes a core fundamental belief if instilled at an early age, and if questioned later in life, the person’s core sense of reality seems shaken.
Studies indicate that boys suffer the most harm when the boys are stuck with mothers who express hostility towards their fathers- the source of their male identity. The mother’s brainwashing of a daughter is particularly powerful due to the daughter’s identification with the mother. When a mother poisons her daughter’s love of her father, she is also compromising her daughter’s ability to maturely love any man. The adult children who were brain washed will not present this as a problem, and has special defenses to guard against this awareness.
Why would a mother do this to her own children? The story of Medea may help us to understand such motives. The Greek drama served the purpose to not just entertain, but to provide a catharsis for the collective unspoken traumas and pains of the audience. These classic stories express most beautifully powerful human conflicts characteristic of our universal psychology. Written around around 400 .B.C., it is a story of intense love turned to such intense hate, that Medea kills her own children to get back at her husband for betraying her; she rejoices at having hurt him so.
Medea is an example of a particular form of hatred found in women. Medea’s internal experience is a compound of a sense of injury- a sense that builds to imagined public humiliation and a sense of righteousness. … The righteousness implied here in “the wrong he has dared to do to me” has struck me clinically. It is a frequent accompaniment of hate and hate-based rage. I think it stems from something self-preservative'(“I have been so mistreated that I have this right…”) and some flaw in the super-ego, possibly based on identification with the child’s experience of the rageful mother’s giving herself full permission- and without subsequent remorse- to express her rage toward the child.
A psychodynamic model of severe divorce pathology views the Medea mother as “narcissistically scarred, embittered dependent woman…(who) …attempts to severe father-child contact as a means of revenging the injury inflicted on her by the loss of a self-object, her hero-husband.” The idea is that the Medea mother is so dependent that she cannot deal with the loss, and thus holds on with hate. Her love turned to hate is so passionate that she destroys that which intimacy between them produced. The hate goes beyond her instinctive need to protect her own children. Medea must make the father suffer more than she suffers for it to be a punishment with revenge and make him feel pain.
In short, a mother who brain washes her children against their father has a Medea Complex. She probably has paranoia or at least paranoid features within a borderline or psychotic character structure. She can not deal with the loss, and remains tied to her (ex)husband in an intimate hate, and keeps her children tied to her out of fear.
THE MEDEA COMPLEX AND THE PARENTAL ALIENATION SYNDROME: When Mothers Damage their Daughter’s Ability to Love a Man. Robert M. Gordon, Ph.D. Lees heel artikel hier