Georgetown University, Washington D.C.
Georgetown University, Washington D.C. (Public Domain, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons)

There is an old therapist's maxim that one should keep one's own family out of one's work. Murray Bowen knew this maxim. He had simply decided to do the precise opposite.

Murray Bowen Portrait und Eckdaten zu seinen 8 Konzepten
Murray Bowen — Begründer der Familiensystem-Theorie, NIMH 1954–59.

Bowen (1913–1990) was the eldest of five siblings from an influential family in Waverly, Tennessee, and he had asked himself early on a question that sounds harmless and is not: why are certain problems passed down from generation to generation in families? Not genes, not money – but emotional patterns. The way arguments are conducted. The way silence is maintained. The way love is expressed – or withheld.

In the 1950s he ventured an experiment at the National Institute of Mental Health that his colleagues considered a particularly original form of madness: he had entire families – in which one member suffered from schizophrenia – move into the clinic together. Not just the patient: mother, father, siblings, everyone on the research ward. What sounded to his colleagues like organized chaos turned out to be a gold mine.

For what Bowen observed turned psychiatry on its head: the symptoms of the "ill" family member were often nothing more than the pressure valve for tensions that ran through the entire system. Heal the individual and send him back into the family, and the problem would reliably migrate to the next family member. The family was remarkably democratic about this – someone had to hold the hot potato, and whenever one person put it down, another picked it up.

Skala der Selbstdifferenzierung nach Bowen
Bowens Skala der Selbstdifferenzierung von 0 bis 100.

In 1967 Bowen then did something for which academic life had no precedent: he presented before three hundred colleagues at Georgetown University his famous "Anonymous Paper" – which was, of course, not anonymous at all. He described without mercy the triangular relationships and emotional entanglements in his own family of origin. Here stood a therapist who did not exempt himself from his own theory, and the audience was not sure whether to applaud or call security.

Bowen's insight was so simple that one wonders why nobody had reached it before: Families are emotional systems, and their patterns outlast generations. But how does one make visible something the family itself cannot see – or does not wish to?

For that, a tool was needed. And someone to give that tool a name.

Triangulation Vater Mutter Tochter im Genogramm
Triangulation — Bowens Kernkonzept in einem Schaubild.