The Bowen theory The former Menninger psychiatrist's ideas will be

"The family, as a biological institution, has survived 180 million years."

--- PAUL MACLEAN, National Institutesof Mental Health, Clinical Brain Disorder Branch

--- Submitted

By ROGER MARTIN

Special to The Capital-Journal

Last year's Kansas Board of Education debate about evolution would have intrigued the late Murray Bowen.

Bowen, a psychiatrist, believed that anybody who wanted to understand human behavior would be smart to observe the behavior of our fellow primates and mammals.

Bowen practiced at Menninger from 1946 to 1954, but his notions did not fit neatly into the Menninger mold. At that time, the institution was wed mostly to the ideas of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, and Bowen's ideas were different from Freud's in several ways.

So Bowen and Menninger parted amicably, and he went off to the National Institute of Mental Health for five years, then joined the Georgetown University Medical School and helped establish what is today known as the Georgetown Family Center.

In the course of his career, Bowen pioneered a psychological approach called "Family Systems Theory." That theory is the basis for one of a dozen or so family therapies, said Pat Hyland, director of the Family Therapy Training Program at Menninger.

The theory "is an alternative to Freudian theory and all other theories that came before it," said Michael Kerr, director of the Georgetown Family Center in Washington, D.C., and a longtime Bowen associate.

On Friday, Kerr, a psychiatrist, will conduct a daylong seminar for mental-health practitioners at Topeka's Holiday Inn and Holidome. The focus: Bowen theory. Kerr's visit to Topeka is being sponsored by Hawk and Hanger Productions, based in Manhattan. The company sponsors visits to Kansas from Georgetown Family Center faculty several times each year.

Bowen's fascination with the parallels between human and animal behavior is one distinction between him and Freud, Kerr said.

Freud, after all, wasn't comfortable with the animal in us. He envisioned a struggle between "our animal nature and our socialized being," Kerr said.

Bowen differed from Freud in a second way, Kerr said. Freud was primarily interested in the individual client, while Bowen studied the family unit, observing how people interacted.

Though Bowen left Topeka nearly 50 years ago, his ideas have a following here and in the region, Hyland said.

The popular works of therapist Harriet Lerner, known for her nonfiction books dealing with family matters, rest in part on Bowen theory.

"His theories have been extremely useful to me both professionally and personally," Lerner said. "Many of his ideas and concepts form the very foundation of my first two books, 'The Dance of Anger' and 'The Dance of Intimacy.'

"I have important disagreements with his ideas, but mostly I feel very lucky to have been exposed to them."

Kerr will open his daylong seminar with a lecture and discussion on the balance between the need each of us has to be an individual and the need to feel connected and accepted by others.

"Every relationship is guided by an interplay of these two," Kerr said, "and the way people respond to threats to either one has a lot to do with whether a relationship works."

Kerr will end the day with a session on his research into the ties between relationship-generated anxiety and cancer. One of the sessions in between will focus on the "Nuclear Family Emotional System."

The family system

Bowen was convinced that given how ancient the roots of "family" are --- stretching back, according to Paul MacLean, a NIMH brain scientist, 180 million years --- it was bad practice for people to sever ties with it.

But family ties also can drive people batty, and that's where Bowen's work began. When Bowen came to the NIMH in 1954, Kerr said, he brought entire families onto wards to study their dynamics.

Why?

Though Bowen's initial research focused on mother/child relationships in situations where the child was schizophrenic, Bowen came to suspect that the whole family --- including previous generations --- might be implicated in the illness, Kerr said.

Moreover, Bowen decided that if you put a single family member on the couch and listened to that person, as Freud had, there was too little from which to draw conclusions.

"Everything depended on people's ability to remember, and then you were limited by their distortions," Kerr said.

Thus, a Bowen therapist sometimes asks a client to bring family members to sessions, and Bowen clients are assigned the job of gathering more information from family members in order to establish a more factual picture of family relations.

"It's do-it-yourself therapy --- almost," Bowen would say.

It may have been a do-it-yourself therapy, but family patterns could, as Bowen saw them, be quite complex. To think in "systems" terms, Kerr said, requires moving away from simple cause-and-effect thinking.

For example, instead of thinking, "Little Johnny's misbehavior is causing his parents to get overinvolved in correcting it," a Bowen therapist might muse, "Little Johnny's misbehavior is a symptom of a larger problem ... maybe he's enacting a subtle, unexpressed tension between Mom and Dad."

Family members, in other words, exist in a web of subtle interconnections. When one person changes, the web vibrates, and many relationships can shift.

The client as investigator

If the phrase "family system" sounds scientific, it's no accident. Bowen's fondness for science shows elsewhere, too. He used the word "molecule," for example, to describe what he considered the smallest stable relationship unit: the triangle.

A couple can have a stable relationship only so long as anxiety is low, Bowen said. When trouble begins, one of the two usually "triangles in" a third person --- a close friend, say --- to discuss problems. That stabilizes the relationship, at least temporarily.

If anxiety between the couple continues to intensify, the other spouse may bring in a confidante, too. Eventually, as the web of anxiety and gossip enlarges, a series of interlocking triangles form. Bowen predicted that triangles would cluster around anxious relationships as reliably as crystals would, under certain circumstances, form in a test tube.

Bowen's emphasis on clients gathering facts about their families was, in spirit, also scientific. It would help them to objectify and de-personalize their understandings of the role they played in the family:

"If people can see that their issue with their mother involves a triangle with the mother and an older sibling and can understand the part each person plays in it, and then how the mother's relationship to her own parents affected that," Kerr says, "they begin to move beyond blame."

Understanding where you were born relative to your brothers and sisters can also be helpful.

"Somebody might grow up resenting the fact that her father made all the decisions and the mother went along," Kerr said. "Simply considering the fact that the father was the oldest of five and the mother the youngest of four can lead toward some understanding."

The natural world

To understand ourselves as members of the natural world is another way of becoming objective.

Look at social mammals in general and you'll see they have a powerful need to be connected, Kerr said, but also to explore and invent on their own.

The dominant-subordinate interactions evident in apes are also evident in people, "and triangles are being observed in more and more detail in chimps and baboons," Kerr said.

A Bowenist would say that the way men and women tend to manage tension has roots in evolutionary history.

Dan Papero, a colleague of Kerr's at the Georgetown Family Center, told an audience of therapists in Manhattan last year, "Distance is one of nature's ways of handling tension. Males back away during tension because that's the way they arrest tension. It's their evolutionary endowment.

"Females want to engage when males back up, because then it's the female's turn to experience stress."

Murray Bowen and

his therapeutic offspring

It's likely that Bowen was the first family therapist at Menninger, Hyland says.

Current and past Menninger faculty will stage a seminar about the history of family therapy training at the institution on Oct. 20 and 21, she said.

"I started working at Menninger in 1973," she said, "and at that point, the sense was still that the primary work was done with the individual. The idea that understanding the family was imperative began in the children's division at Menninger --- but even then family therapy was an adjunct to 'the real work.'"

The first family therapy training program at Menninger was established in 1975, with Katherine Kent, now in private practice in Topeka, its director. Lerner and Hyland point to Kent as the person most responsible for infusing the Topeka mental health community with Bowen theory. Don Shoulberg began a Menninger Family Therapy Training Program in Kansas City in 1980, assisted by Steve Jones and Steve Lerner. Simultaneously, a St. Louis program, headed by Kathy McVoy, sprang up.

"Today, I would say that Menninger feels that working with families and the individual is equally important," Hyland says, "though Bowen's theory wouldn't be the only family approach used."

She added, "Bowen Family Systems therapy is guided by sound theory, is non-judgmental and has been helpful to many."

See BOWEN, page 2-B

Bowen

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