Murray Bowen: Founding Fathers Of Marriage And Family Therapy

Murray Bowen is known as one of the founding fathers of marriage and family therapy. He began his career as a neurosurgery physician but changed to psychiatry and worked with schizophrenic patients. Throughout his work, Bowen began to believe and note that a person’s personality or way of being is a result of their environment and family system. Indeed, Bowenian family therapy has made many important contributions to the field, including such concepts as triangulation, intergenerational transmission, differentiation of self, and undifferentiated family ego mass (Becvar & Becvar, 2013).
Bowen’s concepts do not specifically concentration on mental health but on how people interact. The concept of differentiation to self refers to being able