Murray Bowen

(1913-1990) He comes from Tennessee where his family had a funeral home, he got his psychodynamic  training from Menninger Institute, then gives birth to the Bowen Family System Theory  insisting on the importance of a trigenerational attention to family patterns. He introduced concepts as differentiation of the Self from one’s family of origin and the trigenerational triangle as the attractor in family dynamics.

Carmine Saccu: I met him in 1978 in Rome on the occasion of a seminar and then at the Family Therapy Conference in Florence organized with Andolfi and our group. He was welcoming. He worked with students by sending them to their homes to be therapists for their family of origin. A healthy member who worked for differentiation with the family unit. He broke with psychoanalysts, getting into the habit of talking about himself to clients.

I then met him in Washington on the occasion of his symposium. I remember that on the third day all the most famous systemic therapists came in with a white rose in their mouths trying to introduce the game.

In the evening there was a party, many tables. At each table there were guests and at least one member of the Bowen family. I believe that his model was born because he was entangled in such a large family that his whole life was spent freeing himself from constraints, creating differentiation, seeking identification from the family of origin.

Another time I attended a training meeting and was able to understand how he used his model which included the family of origin in the primary triangle. His clinical attention included three or four generations, he used to work with the most individuated person who needed to go back to the family and perform certain interventions in order to enhance differentiation. The model has been then adopted by us at the Institute in Rome.

Carlos Sluzki: In 1967 took place in Philadelphia what was announced as the first conference aimed at opening a dialogue between clinicians and researchers in the by then new(ish) family field. One of the scheduled presenters was Murray Bowen, a rather stern American psychodynamic psychiatrist who headed a research team at the National Institute of Mental Health focused on family and schizophrenia (another NIMH research project was led by Lyman C. Wynne) and creator of an influential family-of-origin school of family therapy in Washington, DC. According to the meeting’s program, Bowen was supposed to present an update on his NIMH project on the intergenerational transmission of schizophrenia. However, as he took the podium, Bowen announced that he would not focus on the assigned theme but would present his current work with his own family of origin, based on his hypothesis about the differentiation of self as a key goal in clinical practice. And so he did. Bowen’s rather long presentation consisted not only of commented genograms of his ancestry but fragments of interviews with his own siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents, and other family members, from whom he would extract confidential family secrets, mystifications, and taboo family subjects, and then proceed to reveal them publicly to other family members, actively violating all interdictions and family conventions by talking openly about those taboo subjects. That strategy triggered in his family minor and major splits and scandals while he continued to relentlessly defy rules of secrecy that, if kept as secrets and scotomas, would have the effect of imprisoning his own self into the stifling “undifferentiated family ego mass,” blocking true differentiation and autonomy.

The audience, both those who knew of his model and those who didn’t, were quite impacted by this public display of intimacy… and of family betrayals. Further, he seemed to invite implicitly the whole field to disobey mandates of interpersonal as well as institutional secrets and, contrary wise, embrace public display of irreverent revelations (I wonder, guys, do these columns of seemingly innocent gossip accomplish some of those functions for EFTA, and for our field?) The audience reacted intensely, sensing that this presentation also entailed an appeal to challenge oppressive rules in our clinical and organizational practices. Following prolonged applauses, Frank Pittman, the moderator of that plenary, took the podium and, before introducing the commentators of Bowen’s presentation, carried by the impact of Bowen’s contribution, stated that Bowen’s revelations and demystifying proposals merited to be taken seriously and then, grabbing and yanking his own abundant hair, pulled out and threw away with a grand gesture what happened to be a good quality wig that he had been sporting until then, revealing occult shiny naked head, an act that generated another thunderous round of applauses and festive cheers. Both Bowen and Pittman ended up being, in fact, the stars of that event.

Coda: When James Framo, the convener of that conference, was preparing its proceedings for publication as a book, the publishers (or their lawyers) informed him that the only way to include Bowen’s contribution to the volume would be if, instead of being signed by Bowen, it would appear as written by an anonymous author. That is how, after protracted delays and complicated negotiations, that multi-author book (Framo J, Ed. [1972]: Family Interaction: A Dialogue Between Family Researchers and Family Therapists. New York, Springer) includes a chapter written by Anonymous –while everybody knows who Anonymous is by having been there… or by gossip.