Family Thoughts

This book is a compilation of five papers published in two journals, Family Systems Forum and Family Systems: A Journal of Natural Systems Thinking in Psychiatry, between 2008 and 2013. These journals are dedicated to exploring the theory of the family developed by Dr. Murray Bowen (1913-1990). Bowen was one of the leaders in the emergence of family systems theory and therapy beginning in the 1950s. Bowen came to understand that much of human behavior is a product of the family unit, and has a function for the family unit. The papers in this volume explore how beliefs - worldviews, philosophies, values, goals, principles, although emerging in an individual brain, can be regarded as a product of the family unit, and have a function for the family unit. Case studies include Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Henry David Thoreau, Walter Inglis Anderson, Robert Lowell and Jean Stafford.