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...
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Noone, R.J. (2019). Bowen Center for the Study of the Family, The. In: Lebow, J.L., Chambers, A.L., Breunlin, D.C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Couple and Family Therapy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49425-8_597
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