Supervision for the Self-of-the-Therapist

Introduction

Bowen family systems theory is one of the founding theories in the field of marriage and family therapy. Trained initially as a psychiatrist, Murray Bowen began his clinical work providing therapeutic services to patients and families struggling with schizophrenia. Later in his career, he carried forward the things learned from those early experiences to when working with families presenting with less severe psychological disturbances. Bowen’s theory was derived not only from his clinical experiences but also through his own experiences attempting to change his interactions with his family of origin (Katafiasz 2016). The culmination of his work was presented at the family research conference in 1967; he used his own experiences with his family of origin to provide the case example to explain his new theory of therapy. This forms the foundation for supervision from a Bowen perspective; supervisees need to have an academic understanding of the theory but also apply the...