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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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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