Family Evaluation
Michael E. Kerr
Language: English
Pages: 416
ISBN: 0393700569
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The concepts of Murray Bowen, one of the founders of family therapy and the originator of family systems theory, are brought together here in an integrative fashion.
Michael Kerr (who worked with Bowen for many years) and Bowen propose that the enormously complex task of evaluating a clinical family can be orderly when it is grounded in family systems theory.
Using family diagrams and case studies, the book is devoted to an elegant explication of Bowen theory, which analyzes multigenerational family relationships and conceptualizes the family as an emotional unit or as a network of interlocking relationships, not only among the family members, but also among biological, psychological, and sociological processes. Bowen’s persistent inquiry and devotion to family observation, in spite of obstacles and frustrations, have resulted in a theory that has radically changed our ways of looking at all behavior.
explore the world and is largely unavailable for other relationships (such as with father). As a consequence, his life orientation is based mostly on knowledge of mother’s beliefs, fears, and anxieties. The child’s low level of differentiation, aspects of which are evident as a young child, is fixed by adolescence. Mother and child, unable to listen to one another without overreacting, have difficulty maintaining emotional contact and communication. So at one extreme a mother’s functioning in
many families. If the intensity is sufficient, one person is sacrificed to the degree he or she cannot function independently. The interplay of internal processes and relationship processes that is particularly evident when symptoms develop is also evident if a person increases his basic level of differentiation of self. Symptoms disappear or are reduced as a result of an increase in basic level of differentiation with the same predictability that they appear or are accentuated as a result of a
that change in psychiatry would be possible only when medicine had changed a bit. An average research facility is more productive when it is isolated from medicine. The odyssey believed slow change within medicine is more permanent than fast initial change outside of medicine. Most new family therapists chose work in freestanding institutes, away from the controversies within medicine. I was the first of the family research people on the faculty of a medical school. Another factor was the
Family theory, in contrast, assumes that the functioning and behavior of all organisms are significantly influenced by an emotional system that is anchored in the life process at a level probably more basic than genes. This system is assumed to have its roots in protoplasm itself and it may even influence the functioning of genes. The concept assumes that there are some universal characteristics of relationship systems. The relationship processes that operate between intracellular components,
new emotionally significant relationships, they tend to select mates with whom they can replicate the more influential aspects of the relationship process that existed in the original family.4 In other words, people gravitate toward their emotional mirror images. This can happen even when people are determined not to let it happen. The patterns of emotional functioning characteristic of a nuclear family evolve out of this emotional “fit” or “complementarity.” The “fit” between people is part of