ABSTRACT
The third iteration of using a family group with staff involvement as a therapy method occurs in August. This foreshadows the use of family psychotherapy in 1956. Bowen now searches for families to bring into his study.
Bowen, the social worker and the head nurse, presented about the project outside of National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) at Chestnut Lodge in August. They identified the project’s operating principles as based on staff observations of the way family members functioned during the months of hospitalization. In the presentation, Bowen introduced the hypothesis of the family unit. Bowen reframed the theoretical understanding from being a deficit in the offspring to being a family issue involving parents and child.
Tension between Bowen’s project and the broader system emerges. The Genain family is again living on the ward. Dr. Bowen is on the research committee for that family and is clinician to one of the four monozygotic schizophrenic daughters.
During this time period, there are many visitors to Bowen’s ward: John Rawlings Rees and T. P. Rees from England and John M. Caldwell from Georgia.
The C family is discharged from the project in October and in December 1955, Bowen admitted the first intact family to the research ward.
