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During the fifties and sixties, when psychoanalysis enjoyed broad popularity in the U.S., analysts were sought after as expert witnesses in criminal and child custody cases. In 1973 Joseph Goldstein, Anna Freud, and Albert Solnit published Beyond the Best Interests of the Child, which they followed with two other books on the subject. Since then, evaluations and testimony based on psychoanalytic theory have fallen out of favor in the arena of divorce litigation and are generally regarded by courts neither as scientific nor as meeting legal standards of evidence (Spinak 2007; Kapoor and Williams 2012). Despite this trend, a small number of contemporary psychoanalysts have written about high-conflict divorces, including Donner (2006), Ehrlich (2014), Galatzer-Levy, Kraus, and Galatzer-Levy (2009), Gunsberg and Hymowitz (2005), Shopper (2005), and Demby (2009, 2017). These authors have used psychoanalytic concepts and theory to deepen our understanding of the intrapsychic and
relational factors that fuel high conflict in divorce. A recent and notable contribution to this literature is When Divorces Fail: Disillusionment, Destructivity, and High-Conflict Divorce, by the Canadian analyst Arthur Leonoff. An astute psychoanalytic observer and evaluator, Leonoff has worked for many years with high-conflict child custody cases. His eminently readable writing style is as clear and economical as it is vigorous and vivid.
According to Leonoff, the phrase “high-conflict divorce” fails to describe the essence of what is problematic in these divorces. Rather, it is the profound destructiveness engaged in by divorcing spouses, not their level of conflict, that differentiates high-conflict divorce from the normative contentiousness of such matters. Leonoff attributes the unleashing of this destructiveness to the spouses’ traumatic disillusionment in their former spouse and in the marriage as a whole. He writes that a high-conflict divorce is likely to occur when the marriage has b