Family Therapy in Clinical Practice
Differentiation of self and the multigenerational transmission process.
The person who runs away from his family of origin is as emotionally dependent as the one who never leaves home. They both need emotional closeness, but they are allergic to it.
Bowen collected twenty years of clinical papers here, tracing family systems theory from his early research on schizophrenia to a full account of how families function as emotional units. The book sets out the concepts a therapist works with directly: the triangle as the smallest stable relationship system, chronic anxiety passing between generations, emotional cutoff, and the sibling position each person carries into adult attachments.
For the consulting room, it gives a way to read symptoms as a property of the relationship system rather than the individual who presents them. Bowen argues that a therapist's own level of differentiation shapes the work, and he describes managing his own reactivity while staying in contact with every family member. A closing section recounts his effort to define a self within his own family of origin, offered as method rather than confession.
The 1978 Jason Aronson volume ran to 565 pages and remained his single-authored statement of the theory.
About the author
Murray Bowen
Murray Bowen (1913 to 1990) was an American psychiatrist and one of the founders of family systems thinking. Trained in psychoanalysis, he worked at the Menninger Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, and Georgetown University, where he taught for decades. He set out Bowen family systems theory, framing the individual within the emotional field of the family across generations. Its central ideas, differentiation of self, triangles, and multigenerational transmission, are gathered in Family Therapy in Clinical Practice (1978).
Details
- 1978
- English
- Jason Aronson
- Jason Aronson, 1978
- 565
- 9780876683347