Murray Bowen Research Paper

Words: 1099
Pages: 5

When someone goes to the hospital, it involves more than one individual most of the time, usually there’s a family that is impacted. Getting information to the family and gathering important information from them are important transactions that serve patient health and care. The way families manage their stress, relationships and communications vary widely with respect to a host of social aspects. These nuances can be seen and tracked when applying the family systems theory of Dr. Murray Bowen. Family relationships are complex with generational redundancies. It is common thought to consider health issues such as heart disease or diabetes within a family history. Patterns can also be seen in emotional, mental and relationship health too – factors that affect medical health. That is why I am interested in a closer look at family systems. Knowing patterns in the family relationships and any resulting communication issues can be a resource for effective pastoral care for the patient and family.
Family therapy deals with the present interrelationship patterns of the family.
Murray Bowen was born in 1913, in Waverly, Tennessee, a small rural town where his family of origin lived for generations. Both of his parents grew up on farms in the area. His father had an innate talent for reading the clues
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Bowen earned his BS from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 1934, his MD from the University of Tennessee, Memphis in 1937, and did his medical residency at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. His experience as a surgical physician in World War II—where he saw as many psychiatric casualties as surgical ones—influenced his decision to work in psychiatry. In 1946, he joined the Menninger Foundation in Kansas where he chose to focus his research on moving Freudian theory toward the status of accepted science. In 1959, Bowen took a faculty position in the Department of Psychiatry at Georgetown University Medical Center where he worked for the rest of his