ABSTRACT
Murray Bowen was born in 1913, when the scientific thinking emerging out of nineteenth-century Europe was reshaping our understanding of the human and of all living things. Freudian theory and psychoanalysis were in their ascendancy. This intellectual climate and the increasing interest in learning from other life forms was the context in which Bowen eventually formulated his own understanding of the natural world and the place of humans within it. This chapter covers formative experiences in Bowen’s family of origin, at medical school and during his internships as well as the role of Bowen’s influential relationships in the 1930s. During Bowen’s internship at Cumberland Homesteads, in rural Tennessee, he worked closely with Amy Cox; at Bellevue Hospital, in New York City, he worked under Foster Kennedy and at Grasslands Hospital, in Valhalla, New York, where Bowen began a design for a mechanical heart. While there, Gilbert Dalldorf wrote Bowen a letter of reference for Mayo Clinic.
