ABSTRACT
Bowen began clinical work at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in July 1954. His efforts at the Menninger Foundation to move Freudian theory toward science were now repurposed to establish a broad base of facts for Bowen’s theory on natural systems. This chapter discusses his out-patient treatment of an intact father–mother–child family with a diagnosis of alcoholism. Bowen’s observations of shifts in their functioning and transfers in anxiety among the threesome show that his understandings of human interaction were ready for the discovery of the family as a unit. The observations foreshadow what he observed in his research project’s families.
By August Bowen designed a project to study family relationships, with evolution as the underlying research premise, and secured two mother–daughter pairs where the daughters had a diagnosis of schizophrenia for his family project. T. P. Rees, well known for unlocking wards and setting an environment for responsible behavior, visited from England in September. Bowen, the researcher, was thinking family and Bowen, the psychiatrist, received approval for trainee status at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute on October 30, 1954.
