ABSTRACT
The late 1940s and early 1950s were pivotal years for Bowen’s explorations. He was navigating between standard operating principles in psychiatry and more innovative practices. Experimenting in his clinical work, he built on ideas generated from his readings in biology and evolutionary theory and from his dissatisfaction with standard treatments of the time. Bowen also began his own personal psychoanalysis in 1948. This chapter reviews Bowen’s use of at least four models of regression, or anaclitic therapy, with in- and out-patients to further his understandings of schizophrenia, alcoholism and the mother–patient symbiosis. He replicated the family constellation using himself and the nurse as parental figures. He prescribed family visits and increased resources available to families, including social work consultations. In 1949, he cofounded the Shawnee Guidance Center in Topeka, where, in 1951, Bowen furthered his studies with an out-patient population, thus checking his ideas for generalizability, a quality required for any solid theory. Bowen’s tests of the assumptions underlying current PSA theory showed that they were not well supported, and he concluded that a new theory was needed.
