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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
An 8 page overview of this groundbreaking theory in mental health. This paper delineates the major constructs of this theory and emphasizes its importance in restoring healthy family function. Bibliography lists 6 sources.
Page Count:
8 pages (~225 words per page)
File: AM2_PPfamilysystems.rtf
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Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
the latter part of the 1950s and the early years of the 1960s by Dr. Murray Bowen (Kerr, 1988). The family systems theory has become an integral component of
family assessment methodologies as well as therapeutic intervention. THEORY OVERVIEW
Bowen first published the family systems theory over a half a century ago. A professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University Medical Center, in Washington, D.C., Bowen was
focused on the way an individuals family impacted them psychologically (Kerr, 1988). Bowen recognized that an individual was not just an "autonomous psychological entity" but rather was an entity
that was directly integrated into a larger emotional entity, the family (Kerr, 1988). This conceptualization of the family as a large emotional unit was a radical departure from the
way that the family was previously viewed in psychoanalytic theory which focused on the individual components of the family unit rather than on the unit as a whole.
The refocus that came about with the family systems theory resulted in a gradual move in psychoanalytical theory away from a focus on
individual and towards a focus on the whole. While psychoanalysts had previously recognized that interactions between individuals (i.e. object relations) were important, they had still concentrated on the individual
rather than the system that was made up by these individuals. Under the family systems theory clinical disorders were regarded as a throwback to mans earlier evolution where he
was more like lower animals than distinct from them (Kerr, 1988). While humans were distinct from these lower animals in regard to their "elaborately developed cerebral cortex and complex
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