The Bowen Center

As much as 8,000,000 tonnes of plastic enters the ocean every year and this amount is predicted to double within the next decade. This number keeps increasing in pace with global plastics production. Left unchecked, by 2025 as much as 1 tonne of plastic may be in the ocean for every 3 tonnes of fin […]

When Dr. Murray Bowen died in 1990, he left a vast collection of materials, (including audio and videotapes, professional and “Dear Family” letters, original research records, drafts of papers, and presentations) that documents the thinking and research that led to Bowen theory. The Murray Bowen Archives Project is dedicated to making these materials available to […]

As the parental brain extends its attention from self to offspring, neural and physiological adaptations enhance emotional resilience and cognitive flexibility. Stress responsivity – associated with susceptibility to psychiatric illness and chronic disease – is dampened in males from both bi-parental and uni-parental primate models (e.g. owl monkeys and long-tailed macaques, respectively). Recent investigation of […]

Can Bowen theory give us a way to understand the enormous complexity of societal events that we observe or experience personally? Are these events, which have occurred throughout human history, enhanced through media bombardment? This presentation will apply concepts from Bowen theory such as differentiation, triangles, projection process, reciprocal functioning, and cutoff to a number […]

Clinical Public Health is the enhancement of health care by providers’ use of the principles of epidemiology and population health, health policy, health systems management, and community health. Changes in the structure, financing, and performance expectations of health care systems are creating unparalleled opportunities for improved individual and community health while drastically altering the roles […]

This talk will address the predominant theories of grief work in Western culture and in the world of grief therapy as well as the new research on bereavement based on the concept of resilience. These ideas will be contrasted with those in family systems theory in which the level of differentiation across generations is the […]

One of Dr. Murray Bowen’s challenges in developing a science of human behavior was to seek effective ways to engage people to think theoretically about social systems. What difference would learning family systems theory make in their lives? Ms. Andrea Schara is affiliated with Leaders for Tomorrow, where she was founder and president and began […]

Defining a self in one’s family is a foundation for raising one’s level of differentiation. To be robust, this work includes defining or differentiating a self not only in one’s family but also within one’s profession, work system, and within the community and larger society. In this presentation Dr. Peter Titelman will focus on defining […]

Recent research has demonstrated that — like some human newborn infants — newborn rhesus monkey infants are capable of engaging in extensive face-to-face interactions with their mothers throughout their initial days and weeks of life. These face-to-face interactions are thought to facilitate establishing attachment bonds between the infants and their mothers. However, unlike the case […]

The formation of public policy almost always involves issues about which interested parties hold differing views of varying intensity about their resolution. Within the framework of Bowen Theory, those parties form a three-person emotional relationship system, the basic building block which is known as a triangle. The concept of the triangle in Bowen Theory describes […]