Murray Bowen - Biography

Biography

Murray Bowen was born in 1913 as the oldest of five and grew up in the small town of Waverly, Tennessee, where his father was the mayor for some time. Bowen got his B.S. in 1934 at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He received his MD in 1937 at the Medical School of the University of Tennessee Medical School in Memphis. After that, he had internships at the Bellevue Hospital in New York City in 1938 and at the Grasslands Hospital, Valhalla, New York, from 1939 to 1941. From 1941 to 1946, he had his military training followed by five years of active duty with Army in the United States and Europe. During the war, his interest changed from surgery to psychiatry. While observing the soldiers he decided that mental illness was a more pressing and worthwhile goal. After his military service he had been accepted for fellowship in surgery at Mayo Clinic. But in 1946, he started at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, as fellow in psychiatry and personal psychoanalysis. This psychiatric training and experience lasted here until 1954.

From 1954 to 1959, Bowen worked in the National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Maryland, where he began to develop the theory that would be named after him: Bowen Theory. At that time, family therapy was still only a by-product of theory. Bowen did his initial research on parents who lived with one adult schizophrenic child, which he thought could provide a dimension for all children. After defining the field of family therapy he started integrating concepts with the new theory. None of this had previously been described in the literature, and was being connected with Freudian theory. What began the first year became known nationally in about two years.

From 1959 to 1990 he worked at the Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington DC as clinical professor at the department of Psychiatry, and later as director of Family Programs and founder of a Family Center. He had a half-time research and teaching appointment. His research focused on human life rather than symptomatic cubicles. Through association with medicine, knowledge has been extended to every medical specialty, and even the prodromal states that precede medical diagnoses. For Bowen each concept was extended, and woven into physical, emotional, and social illness. As long as psychiatry exists to diagnose and treat emotional illness, its potential is limited. This new work went beyond another family systems theory. He aimed on a theory that eventually would replace Freudian thinking.

Beside this research and teaching Bowen had other faculty appointments and consultantships. He was visiting professor in a variety of medical schools, for example at the University of Maryland from 1956 to 1963 and at the Medical College of Virginia of Richmond from 1964 to 1978. He was life fellow at the American Psychiatric Association and at the American Orthopsychiatric Association, and life member at the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry. He was at the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in 1961 and first president at the American Family Therapy Association.

Murray Bowen received awards and recognitions, and among them.

• 1978-1982, Originator and First President, American Family Therapy Association.
• 1985 June, Alumnus of the Year, Menninger Foundation.
• 1985 December, Faculty, Evolution of Psychotherapy Conference, Erickson Foundation, Phoenix,
• 1986 June, Graduation Speaker, Menninger School of Psychiatry,
• 1986, Governor’s Certificate, Tennessee Homecoming ‘86, Knoxville.
• 1986 October, Distinguished Alumnus Award, University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

Bowen remained active and interested in family therapy his entire life. It is said that his theory is one of the purest ideas that family therapy has created. He was the first president of the American Family Therapy Association from 1978 to 1982. He died of lung cancer in 1990.