Murray Bowen

Out of the 1950s and 1960s, psychiatrist Murray Bowen emerged as the leading theoretician providing an alternative to Bateson’s Palo Alto group, which developed theories of change in family therapy but deliberately avoided developing a more comprehensive theory about family process and family functioning (Watzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson, 1967). Although other family therapists were making important research and clinical contributions during this time, Bowen was the first to develop a comprehensive theory of family functioning (Bowen, 1978; Kerr & Bowen, 1988).

Bowen was the son of a funeral director and a member of complex, intertwined family in Tennessee. He was attracted to biology and evolutionary theory while training to be a psychiatrist. After initial training in psychoanalytic therapy, he began to become interested in families as a natural system. Bowen worked first at the Menninger Clinic in Kansas and then in 1954 moved to the National Institute of Mental Health where he conducted research on families and schizophrenia and began to develop his systems theory and therapy. In 1959 he moved to Georgetown Medical School and founded a family therapy training program that continues to bear his name.

In 1967, Bowen made the most famous public presentation in the history of family therapy. At a family therapy conference in Philadelphia, he presented a paper, “On the Differentiation of Self,” which was a description of his own family and his efforts to become differentiated as an adult while still maintaining contact (Bowen, 1978). It was also a striking effort to differentiate his model as more than a technique of working with family of origin issues and to stake claim to the necessity of the therapist’s own development.

Using a biological metaphor linking individual and family differentiation, Bowen’s theory described how family processes foster or diminish the individual’s differentiation of self to achieve of a balance between intellectual and emotional functioning and a balance of autonomy and togetherness in social relationships. Bowen viewed individuals as struggling with an evolutionary past from biology that accentuates lower brain functioning and stimulates fight-or-flight anxiety. Anxiety in turn leads to low differentiation of self or the inability to separate the emotional and rational domains of the mind. Anxiety and low differentiation of self are fostered in a nuclear family emotional system characterized by emotional fusion without autonomy, emotional cutoff out of fear of fusion, and conflict through third patties rather than directly (triangulation). In Bowen’s theory, a family’s problems with low differentiation between family members and with triangulation are apt to be transmitted to the next generation unless corrective measures are taken.

Bowen de-emphasized technique in his therapy model. The heart of therapeutic healing in Bowen family therapy is the therapist’s own differentiation of self and consequent ability to stay out of triangles and to maintain a nonanxious objectivity in the face of the family’s emotional field. The goal is to promote the differentiation of family members so that they can be distinct selves while maintaining emotional connection.

Assessment involves genograms that examine the emotional history of each family of origin. In therapy sessions the therapist focuses on the spouses (or a single parent or family leader) and controls the interchanges in therapy to diminish reactivity and to help them touch on areas of emotional importance in a calm, low-key way. The therapist’s nonreactivity is crucial in modifying the emotional field. After the initial therapy phase that focuses on lowering reactivity, patients are coached to research their family of origin, focusing on issues such as locating cutoffs, finding lost relatives, correlating dates of change, delineating interlocking triangles, and noting similarities of symptoms, issues, and the positions of those who become symptomatic over the generations (Friedman, 1985). Patients ultimately are helped to change their responses to habitual family interactions, to maintain an “I” position that combines individuation and connection. In cases where patients have done good family work and anxiety is very low, Bowen would use later sessions for didactic explanations of the theory underlying the work.