Work
Many people believe that growing up in this small town is what gave Murray Bowen his foundation for his family therapy theories. He believed that the primary source of human emotional experience is the extended family unit.
Bowen studied psychoanalysis for several years at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas. While at the Menninger clinic he studied patients with schizophrenia, and discovered a unique relationship between them and their mothers; this led to his concept of differentiation of self, which is autonomy from others and separation of thoughts from feelings. From there he moved on to National Institute of Mental Health in 1954 where he began work on expanding the mother – child relationship to include fathers and thus sparking the idea of triangulation. He believed that the triangle was the smallest unit in a relationship. The idea of a triangle is that one diverts a conflict between two people by involving a third. In 1959 he moved to Georgetown University Medical Center and began more extensive work on family systems and how they relate to one another during therapy. He believed that family members adopt certain types of behavior based on their place in the family.
He obtained a great deal of information while at Georgetown, including the need to make a hard effort to remain an objective party. He first attempted to have sessions with families and staff on the assumption that togetherness and open communication would be therapeutic. His staff began to become pulled in different directions and the same effect carried through when he attempted these multifamily meetings alone. He decided that families needed to be met with one at a time. During this time he also coined the term emotional cutoff. This refers to the natural mechanisms people use to counter high anxiety or high emotional fusion, from unresolved issues with family. Cutoff can look like physical or emotional withdrawal, avoidance of sensitive topics, physically moving away from family members, and rarely going home.
His final large contribution was that of his own personal discovery; the idea of differentiation. Differentiation is the capacity of a person to manage his or her emotions as well as thinking; their individuality as well as their connections to others. Bowen thought of differentiation as an emotional capacity which could be conceived on a scale of 0 - 100, 100 being an imaginary ideal. Differentiation has also been defined as the measure of one's emotional maturity. Increasing one's differentiation is thought to be a lifetime project in which one grows in a capacity to better manage one's own connection as well as independence from one's family of origin and other close relationships. A higher level of differentiation would make one less apt to get drawn into other's emotional issues (being "triangled") and be less emotionally reactive to close relationships.
Bowen felt that severe problems within the family unit stem from a multigenerational transmission process whereby levels of differentiation among family members can become progressively lower from one generation to the next. He developed an extended family systems therapy with the goal to increase individual family members level of differentiation.
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