Introduction
The Georgetown University Family Center was founded in 1975 by Murray Bowen, MD, who, at the time, was a clinical professor in psychiatry and director of Family Programs at the Georgetown University School of Medicine in Washington, DC. Dr. Bowen had moved to Georgetown following his landmark 5-year study of the family at NIMH (1954–1959). Based on this research and further studies, he developed a formal systems theory of the family, which was published in 1966 (Bowen 1978). Initially, he taught psychiatric residents and medical students. A group of graduating residents who participated began the Symposium on Family Theory and Family Psychotherapy in 1965, which has continued to the present day.
When a growing number of mental health professionals showed interest in learning more about his theory of family systems, he began a postgraduate training program in 1969. When Dr. Bowen was awarded a grant from NIMH for fellowships in family psychiatry, he founded the Georgetown...
References
Bowen, M. (1966). The use of family theory in clinical practice. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 7, 345–374.
Bowen, M. (1978). Family therapy in clinical practice. New York: Jason Aronson.
Kerr, M. E., & Bowen, M. (1988). Family evaluation: An approach based on Bowen theory. New York/London: W.W. Norton.
Noone, R. J., & Papero, D. V. (Eds.). (2015). The family emotional system: An integrative concept for theory, science, and practice. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Papero, D. V. (1990). Bowen family systems theory. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Titelman, P. (2014). Differentiation of self: Bowen family systems perspectives. New York: Routledge.
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Noone, R.J. (2017). The Bowen Center for the Study of the Family. In: Lebow, J., Chambers, A., Breunlin, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Couple and Family Therapy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15877-8_597-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15877-8_597-1
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