Here are some prescient and pertinent quotes from the 1988 book "Impasses of Divorce" by Johnston and Campbell. Also see a list of about 60 similar references in standard psychology, which together show that "pathogenic parenting" is simply a manifestation of standard and established pathologies.
Page 52: Chapter 3, entitled "Illusions and Delusions," is an entire chapter devoted Delusions (as the chapter title indicates).
Page 53: "extremely negative polarized views of each other that are sustained by little or no evidence in current reality" .... "They resist their children's contact with the other parent and fight, consciously and righteously, to protect their children from the bad, immoral, or neglectful caretaking of the other parent"
Page 54: "The phenomena are construed as evidence of personality disorder. Object-relations theorists, in particular, consider these kinds of relationships as characteristic of primitively organized, or at best regressed, individuals who are unable to maintain a balanced view of self and other and thus sit and project good and bad onto others. The origins of this defensive splitting are believed to be in disturbances in early care-giving relationship (Kernberg, 1967; Kohut, 1977, Mahler, 1971; Masterson, 1981). The behavioral characteristics of the types we have identified may then be seen as emanating from enduring psychological predispositions or vulnerabilities within individuals, which have been developmentally determined and structurally fixed. This formulation suggests a cross-situational potential for relating to people as transference objects from the past".
Page 88 and 89: "Narcissistic Vulnerability: Seriously Disturbed Spouses: In the most vulnerable range of our spectrum are parents with either serious paranoid disturbances, or those who have fairly well circumscribed paranoid delusions or fixed ideas about their ex-mates ..... What these spouses have in common with moderately disturbed ones is a grandiose sense of self and a paramount need to keep the bad external to themselves and to maintain good internal representations. The two types are differentiated by the higher degree of distrust and animosity these parents feel towards their ex-mates, by their belief that their former spouses intend to and could harm or exploit them and their children, and by their more urgent need to actively counter the hostility, danger, and victimization they perceive and anticipate from their ex-mates. Hence, these spouses generally have more actively aggressive, suspicious, accusatory stances via-a-vis their ex-mates. With often frightening intensity, they collect evidence and build their cases, intending to prove that their ex-mates are are "drug addicts, "neglectful or abusive," "predators," or "sociopaths." They write bullying letters, make frantic, ominous phone calls; leave death threats, and pressure their attorneys to act more aggressively, often with little or no concern for the consequences to others. Under conditions of a very traumatic separation or a sustained challenge to their narcissism (for example, the rejection inherent in ongoing conflict), moderately disturbed spouses can decompensate into the more paranoid disorders of this group. Severely disturbed spouses experience their separation and divorce as a deeply humiliating attack and injury. Feeling vulnerable and intentionally weakened by assault, they respond defensively with an immediate desire to counterattack and seek revenge, a desire that often becomes a central obsession in their lives. In these cases, the revenge motif is the overriding motivation rather than a desire to increase a good sense of self or the desire to prove the other spouse bad. They seek retribution, not simply a righting of the wrong that has been done to them. More than a container for their bad traits, the other spouse becomes a dangerous, aggressive, persecutory figure. By and large, these spouses are socially isolated and often secretive. Retreating into fantasy, the develop florid delusion or ideas about their ex-mates. As they piece together, in their memory, the rubble of their marriage, they begin to rewrite history. This reconstruction justifies the feeling that they have been wronged, duped, and betrayed, probably intentionally.
Page 91: "Given their view of themselves as "great protectors," many such parents feel a need to make a strong stand against their ex-mates. Litigation can become a way of life for these parents, as it fuels their fixed ideas or paranoid delusions and offers them "legitimized vindication." They can get even and at the same time redress their narcissistic injury. Winning the custody battle proves them "right." If the judge decides in their favor, it justifies their negative view of the ex-spouse and their conspiracy theories. If the judge does not decide in their favor, he or she is seen as another conspirator or persecutor. They dismiss this judgment and continue the fight in another court. The latter is most often the result, since these parents' disturbance is usually evident, and their ability to parent adequately is therefore clearly suspect."
Page 92: "The parents who actively seek revenge usually involve their children directly in their attempts to punish the ex-spouse and redress perceived injustices and attacks. They enlist their children as allies and coconspirators [sic], press them into espionage activities, and in other ways use them as weapons or instruments of their anger, with little understanding or concern for the impact on the children. Mr. F. refused to visit his son, to spite his ex-wife: "I'm not going to be used as her baby-sitter." While for some, parenting remained intact (usually individuals with more focused delusions about their ex-spouses), most are barely cognisant [sic] of the children's feelings or emotional needs."
Page 94: Such parents are often unable to tolerate any of their children's feelings (loyalty, love, concern, guilt) for the other parent. Sensing these, they feel endangered and become suspicious that the child has "gone over to the other side." Now seeing the child as a copersector, they can become vindictive and precipitously rejected the child. Even the child's entry into an alliance is not always sufficient to assuage the parent's suspicions and assure caretaking. Severely disturbed parents who are intensely focus on rescuing their children from the pernicious influence of the other parent tend to deny the children's problems. What difficulties they do acknowledge, they attribute to the ex-spouse's pathology and thus make an added reasons to decrease access. All too often, they try to involve their children in their delusions about their ex-mate, often utterly undermining the child's sense of reality."
Page 95: "Clients obtain a great deal of narcissistic gratification from attorneys who "fight for" them, and from relatives and friends who "believe in" them."
Page 104: "In an attempt to ward off loss, parents often turn to their children as replacements for the spouse. They become emotionally dependent and lean on their children to soften the loss, using the children as companions or confidantes. The intensity of their need for the child as surrogate parent or spouse increases with the stress of the divorce and with the severity of parent's own vulnerabilities. " ..... "Other parents, over-identify to varying degrees with their children and project their intolerance of sadness and fears of being alone onto the children. They then seek to protect their children from these distressful emotions and consciously view the custody suit as means of doing so. In the end, the child's distress and their own loneliness is ameliorated in this flurry of protective activity" .... "two main types of intra psychoconflict - reactivated loss and separation-individuation problems."
Page 104: Reactivated Trauma of Loss "There are parents who are basically intact, with less severe intrapsychic difficulties, who have a specific difficulty in mourning the loss of a real, psychologically separate loved one. Consequently, they cannot let go of the spouse, the marriage, or the family and also have great difficulty in allowing their child to leave, even for visits. Their vulnerability derives form a specific (circumscribed) trauma around loss that is reactivated and confused with the present divorce situation"
Page 109: Separation-Individuation Conflicts "Among those involved in long-term, entrenched divorce disputes, we found a much larger group of parents for whom dependency and separation-individuation conflicts are the key underlying issues. To varying degrees, these parents have not mastered the developmental task of psychological separation from primary caretakers and have, in their marriages, replicated these disturbed primary relationships with their spouses. Object-relations theorists (for example Mahler, 1971; Kernberg, 1967, Materson, 1981) have described these people in times of disturbances in their "self-object relationships." For them, others do not fully exist and have never existed as separate persons, but to varying extents, are perceived as projected fragments or reconstitutions of their inner psychological needs."
Page 113: "By and large, these parents have little understanding of the children's needs separate from their own and use the children in a number of ways to gratify their own needs. Depending on the sex and age of the child, this may lead to incipient pathologies in the parent-child relationship. For example, some men substitute their early-adolescent daughters for their spouses so that they child becomes the new fantasy object. This leads to disturbing, diffusely sexualized relationships between father and daughter." .... "Typically, grade-school children are used for emotional support: These children essentially become peers and parents to their mothers and fathers, monitoring and guarding the vital signs of their parents' well-being."
Page 157: 16% of children had a strong alliance with one parent, 43% and alignment, and 30% had a loyalty conflict.
Page 160: Instead, from the middle to late elementary school years (ages nine to twelve), alignments typically began to form as the child made a choice for one parent and, with varying degrees of intensity, began to exclude and reject the other." .... "others became involved in intense "unholy" alliances."
Page 166: "Many of the older children in this category were prone to making alliances, and taking on the identity or a raging, paranoid, or sullen depress parent. They parroted the complaints of the aggrieved parent and repeated stories and the despicable behavior of the other "word for word." Some of these stories sounded like family legends of events that had occurred many years previously. Once the strong alliance was formed, these children looked more cohesive, more organized, and and intact. They could express feelings, including anger Many were free of anxiety and cognitively clear as if the alliance had solved a difficult dilemma. However, the need to defend the alliance belied its fragility. A great deal of distortion was often necessary to maintain the solid inflexible stance. They refused to check out the reality of their position and refused visits, phone call,s and letters from the other parent. It seemed as if they had made a split between the good and the bad, projecting each part onto a different parent and taking refuge the the "good one". "