The Contemporary Utility of Bowens Original Works

This paper will give an overview of Murray Bowen's theory of family systems. It will describe the model's development and outline its core clinical components. The practice of therapy will be described as well as recent developments within the model. Some key criticisms will be raised, followed by a case example which highlights the therapeutic focus of Bowen's approach.

Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Bristol

The Family Construct Approach poses a challenge to traditional models of psychiatric and other medical research.This is achieved by providing a methodology which focuses on illness processes in the context, specifically, of the interpersonal construing surrounding the illness events, rather than arbitrarily isolating an individual and divorcing the study from these. Psychosomatic medicine has been stuck conceptually for decades, stuck with general categories which can only provide general truths. The paper outlines the theoretical and practical aspects of the approach.

Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 1988

The origins and evolution of family interaction research are outlined i n order to examine the apparent lag in the field after the initial hopes and enthusiasms of the 1960s. It is argued that family interaction research naturally drew upon the methodology of social psychology and that there was an insufficient integration of the implications of the clinical viewpoint of family systems theory into research procedure. A discussion is presented of some central concepts in scientific psychology, drawing conclusions as to how they can be broadened for the special field of family research. An experimental method for evaluating the public verifiability of complex clinical notions is described, and a number of recent inuestigations are scrutinized in the light of our critique. It is concluded that there are grounds for being optimistic that the gap between clinical and research thinking can be bridged, making the assessment and refinement of abstract and intricate concepts discovered in clinical procedures accessible to scientific experimentation.

Transactional Analysis Journal, 1983