Contribuições da Teoria Sistêmica acerca da Alienação Parental

Parental Alienation (AP) consists i n a group of conscious or unconscious maneuvers done by one of the parents with the purpose of pushing the other parent away from the child’s life. The current article describes the contributions from the Systemic Theory that can help comprehend a few phenomena from AP and contributes to a contextualized and complex understanding of the family processes that lead to this type of confi guration. The concepts analyzed in this article are: organization and structure from the family system; functional and nonfunctional systems; barriers and rules; repeated transitional patt erns of dysfunctional family systems; the alliances with the legal guardian; and transgeracionality. The article contributes to a broader and contextualized view of the AP through the consideration of the family system as a whole and the dysfunctional relations that the subsystems establish with each other which are at the root of the behaviors that start and maintain the AP. Keywords: Parental Alienation, Systemic Theory, family.