Book Review
Forensic Psychiatry 
A Handbook of Divorce and Custody: Forensic, Developmental, and Clinical Perspectives Linda Gunsberg, Paul Hymowitz,
editors. Hillsdale (NJ): The Analytic Press; 2005. 409 p. US$79.95.
Reviewer
rating*: Excellent
Review by: Leo Uzych, JD, MPH
Wallingford, Pennsylvania
The seeds of this enthralling, if sobering, work were planted at a conference focusing on children and the law that was sponsored by the New York Freudian Society in November 1997. These seeds have germinated into a text imbued with a visceral concern for children. This primary interest in serving the perceived best interests of children, as critically filtered through the prisms of the respective contributors, reverberates unmistakably through the pages of this refreshingly candid and absorbingly intense book.
A key aspiration is to promote more comfortable professional comity between mental health professionals and their colleagues in law. As explained in the Preface, mental health professionals need to know more about the law, including law directly affecting child custody and divorce. Concomitantly, legal professionals need to be better informed about mental health–centric issues, including psychology as it appertains to child development and parenting. In fact, a strong sense and recognition of the immense professional value of good collaboration between legal and mental health professionals is firmly embedded in the text.
In terms of legal aspects, the perspicacious study of divorce and custody undertaken by the handbook’s contributors, is notably confined to the nettlesome terrain of US law. Because the professional affiliations of the various contributors are uniformly American, this engagingly thoughtful primer lacks a multinational flavour. Moreover, even though the professional expertise of the various contributors extends to law as well as to clinical and forensic psychology, psychiatry, and social work, their collective expertise is skewed heavily toward mental health. The intellectual length and breadth of possible future editions might be augmented by a relatively broader representation, with more contributors drawn from the domain of law.
The foregoing caveats notwithstanding, it cannot be gainsaid that the book’s contributors have cautiously and expertly probed the thorny terrain of US family law, with academic theory, research findings, and practical professional experiences all being important tools, and that the impressive result of their diligent spadework has been the unearthing of rich deposits of forensic–psychologic wealth. They have succeeded in illuminating many of the vexations affecting researchers and clinicians in these interfused fields. For inquisitive readers, this book is a highly instructive gateway to erudition with respect to the intermeshed areas of psychology and law.
Structurally, the handbook has 6 sections. Each section commences with an exordium (described as an “interlude”) that introduces readers to the vexing psychologic–legal issues and problems to be confronted.
Contributors in one section cut a wide swath, exposing some of the drama (or perhaps, melodrama) of the courtroom, from the varied perspectives of a family court judge, a matrimonial lawyer, and several psychologists. The integral issue of parental psychopathology and its effects on children is at the core of another section. In a third section, readers are presented with a cluster of contributions that grapple with the fractious relations among state action, parental rights and responsibilities, and children. A fourth section rivets attention on the anatomy and workings of family forensic evaluations. Yet another section adroitly dissects and examines some of the profundities of the law and mental health corpus of “visitation.” The last section comprises a group of contributions examining some of the travails of postdivorce life. Strands emphasizing the primacy of children’s needs are artfully and dominantly interwoven into the textual tapestry.
The textual discussions characteristically paint engrossing concerns with a fairly wide brush. Certainly, the text should not be misused as a surrogate for the sagacious counsel of qualified professionals in particular, real-life cases. Possibly relevant issues of culture and ethnicity, as they may impact bonded family law and mental health concerns, receive little attention. The inclusion of demanding study questions might have embellished the book’s didactic value; their absence is regretted. Finally, a fascinating aspect of US law is its evanescent nature, affected as it is by the whims of law-making politicians and by the caprices of judges crafting case law. Given the real nature of US law, the attempted grafting of developmental theory and psychoanalytic thought onto its bedrock remains a most daunting endeavour.
The insights and information proffered by this excellent road map tracing the evolution of research-centred as well as clinically directed advances germane to mental health and family law, should be most gratifying and edifying to researchers and practitioners in these interjoined fields, including psychologists, psychiatrists, lawyers, social workers, and judges.
*Reviewer
Rating Scale/ Échelle d’évaluation du réviseur
Excellent / Excellent
Very Good / Très bon
Good / Bon
Fair / Passable
Not recommended / Pas recommandé
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