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It is with great pleasure that I introduce this widely acclaimed compendium of a lifetime of clinical practice by Murray Bowen. It has been many years since I met Bowen at the Orthopsychiatry workshops in the 1950's, where most of the present leaders in family psychiatry met and shared ías, year after year. Many of them, like Bowen, came from the Washington-Baltimore area, where Adolf Meyer and Harry Stack Sullivan had much earlier pioneered their interpersonal approach to schizophrenia. Others from that area were the late Donald Jackson, Donald Bloch, Jurgen Ruesch and Harold Searles.
Bowen divides the selection of 22 papers (each a chapter of the book) into four sections: Schizophrenia and the Family, Family Systems Theory, The Bowen Theory, and Applications.
Mahler, in 1954, and Green and Schecter very soon after, published articles describing the unwitting damage suffered by children caught in symbiotic attachments to parents. Bowen and others were finding this type of attachment problem especially intense in families containing one or more members suffering from a schizophrenic illness. In England at the child psychiatry outpatient clinic of Cassell Hospital and in pediatric psychiatry at Roosevelt Hospital beginning in 1951, families were interviewed conjointly, and treatment strategies were planned in terms of the family constellation. Bowen describes his own work with these families in the first chapter, originally presented as a paper in 1957. Here he delineates for the first time the difficult fusion-differentiation issues, and the quiet, profound shifts of intense anxiety from one family member to another.
In the subsequent chapters of the section on schizophrenia (1957-1961), Bowen describes the impact of dominance-submission involving immaturity and inadequacy on the part of both parents, with the symbiotic mother-patient bond tending to exclude and reinforce the anxious withdrawn father. He summarizes this section, more or less, in the final paper of 1961