Family law assessment

Abstract

The development of the psychiatric assessment of children and adolescents in the context of the divorce proceedings of their parents is outlined. After the Second World War, under the influence of psychoanalysis and attachment research on the allocation of children to the main caregiver, the mother almost always became the dominant figure. This natural primacy of the mother, as it was called in the legal literature, was only corrected by the Federal Supreme Court in the mid-1980s. The first major research on children of divorced couples was presented in Switzerland in 1948 by Carl Haffter. Subsequently, it was mainly research in the USA by Judith Wallerstein, Jeannet Johnston and later Paul Amato that became relevant for expert practice. The revision of the divorce law in 2000 also brought considerable changes for experts with new questions, such as joint parental custody or the division of custody shares.