Differentiation of Self

Bowen Family Systems Theory Perspectives

Peter Titelman, Peter Titelman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136328497
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Bowen theory views the family as an emotional unit. The family is a natural system that has evolved, like all living systems. The elegance and unity of the concept of differentiation of self, and of Bowen theory in its entirety, is that they describe the basis of individual functioning in relation to others within the emotional systems of family, occupation, community, and larger society.
This volume consists of essays elucidating and applying differentiation of self, the central concept of Bowen family systems theory and therapy. The purpose of the volume is fourfold:
• to describe the historical evolution of differentiation of self
• to analyze the complex dimension of this concept as the integrating cornerstone of Bowen theory
• to present applications of the concept for both the therapist/coach and in clinical practice
• to examine the problems and possibilities of researching differentiation of self
The largest part of this volume is the presentation of in-depth case studies of clients or therapists in their efforts to differentiate or define self. This provides an understanding of the what and how that go into the differentiation of self. Contributed to by professionals who have studied, applied, and taught Bowen theory in their own lives, practices, educational settings, and training settings, this volume is a must-have for any therapist/coach working within a systems perspective.

I
THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE CONCEPT OF DIFFERENTIATION OF SELF

1
THE CONCEPT OF DIFFERENTIATION OF SELF IN BOWEN THEORY

Peter Titelman

This introductory chapter is an overview of the concept of differentiation of self, the cornerstone of Bowen theory. It will be placed in the context of Bowen theory as a whole. Bowen theory views the family as an emotional unit that has evolved, like all living systems. The elegance and utility of the concept of differentiation, and of Bowen theory in its entirety, are that they describe the basis of individual functioning in relation to others within the emotional systems of the family, occupation, community, and larger society.

Differentiation of self is the cornerstone concept of Bowen family systems theory. It describes the broad variation in human functioning and relationships. This chapter proposes to answer three questions: how did Murray Bowen develop the concept of differentiation of self? What are the components of the concept? And how is the concept applied in clinical practice and for therapists or coaches? The chapter is divided into the following four parts: 1) the historical evolution of Bowen’s concept of differentiation of self, 2) the concept of differentiation of self in the context of Bowen theory, 3) differentiation of self and the other seven concepts, and 4) the application of differentiation of self.

The Historical Evolution of Bowen’s Concept of Differentiation of Self

How did Bowen come to formulate the concept of differentiation of self? His ideas about the concept emerged from the interplay between his family experience, his education, the professional and societal contexts in which he lived, and their impact on his theory development, research, and clinical practice.

Bowen’s Life Experience from Childhood through Middle Adulthood (1913–1946)

Murray Bowen was the oldest sibling and a natural leader in his family of origin. He was followed by two brothers and two sisters. Bowen’s father owned and ran a funeral home in Waverly, Tennessee. At one point his father not only owned the funeral home but also a small department store, and was the mayor of Waverly. Bowen lived there until he went to college. In the town, his family knew everyone. They were highly respected and highly involved in that community.

Bowen grew up on the family farm steeped in contact with the natural world of animals and other forms of nature. This experience undoubtedly played a part in his later interest in natural systems. And his involvement with the family funeral home put him in touch with death as a natural part of the human life cycle.

As a young man Bowen was drawn more to science than the arts. He chose to go to medical school at the University of Tennessee in Memphis. He applied for a residency in surgery after finishing medical school and was accepted. History, however, intervened and he spent five years in the army as a medical doctor both on bases in the United States and overseas in Europe during World War II. He rose from lieutenant to major. His experience in treating traumatic war neuroses led to his changing his focus from surgery to psychiatry. It is likely that he observed variation in the way soldiers recovered from war traumas, and this experience may have played a part in development of the idea of a continuum of human functioning or levels of differentiation of self.

The Menninger Foundation Years: The Beginning of Bowen’s Transition From Psychoanalytic Theory Toward a Natural Systems Theory (1946–1954)

After the war Bowen applied to the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, for his psychiatric residency and was accepted in 1946. Psychoanalytic theory was the dominant psychiatric theory after World War II, and Bowen studied it at Menninger. He wrote that:

The basic formula was to learn all there was to know about psychoanalytic theory, as much as was possible to know about the theory that governed professional disciplines, and to use clinical practice for the clues that might connect Freudian theory to the accepted scientific disciplines.

(1988, p. 348)

Bowen was deeply involved in psychoanalytic theory, but he began to question its viability because of its lack of scientific grounding.

Bowen was on the library committee at the Menninger Foundation for many years. Through his library studies he began to develop the seeds of a theory of human behavior that would be grounded on a natural science foundation and on his careful readings in the following disciplines: psychiatry, psychoanalysis, psychology, medicine, sociology, anthropology, ethology, physiology, biology, philosophy, social work, religion, mathematics, physics, botany, chemistry, evolution, systems theory, astronomy, paleontology, and others (1988, p. 359).

He had many questions that were not adequately accounted for in psychoanalytic theory. The following are some examples: maternal deprivation did not necessarily lead to mental illness; schizophrenogenic parents who had one schizophrenic offspring often had other children who appeared normal; and, while some individuals suffered severely from single emotional traumas, this “… appeared logical in specific cases, but did not explain the large number of people who suffered trauma without developing symptoms” (1978, p. 353). He wrote:

There were assumptions that emotional illness was the product of a process of forces of socialization even though the same basic emotional illness was present in all cultures. Most of the assumptions considered emotional illness as specific to humans, then there is evidence that a similar process was also present in lower forms of life. These and many other questions led me to extensive reading in evolution, biology, and the natural sciences as part of a search for clues that could lead to a broader theoretical frame of reference. My hunch was that emotional illness comes from the part of man he shares with the lower forms of life.

(1978, p. 353)

The discrepancies that Bowen perceived in psychoanalytic theory and his openness to science, specifically evolutionary theory and a natural systems theory of living organisms, led him to (eventually) fashion a “… natural systems theory, designed to fit with the principles of evolution and the human as an evolutionary being” (Bowen, 1978, p. 360).

It may be that the earliest seeds of the concepts of psychological symbiosis and emotional fusion, differentiation of self, the multigenerational transmission process, the emotional system, the feeling system, and the intellectual system began to percolate in Bowen’s head before he had even begun his research on schizophrenia and the family. They may have been rooted in his contact with nature growing up and from readings in the area of the natural sciences.

As early as 1951 Bowen wrote: “I had fooled around with patients and parents in Topeka in 1951” (Boyd, 2007, p. 204). When Bowen presented his ideas about the family system to the Menninger staff, he was criticized and told to seek more psychoanalysis for himself (Sykes-Wylie, 1991, p. 28). He then began to realize that he would have to seek a different work setting in order to develop his newly emerging natural systems assumptions and family systems concepts. The next stop on his odyssey was the National Institute of Mental Health, in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1954.

The National Institute of Mental Health Years: Research on Schizophrenia and the Family, From a Dyadic Model to the Family as an Emotional Unit (1954–1959)

Bowen came to NIMH, in Bethesda, Maryland, where he directed a study of schizophrenia and the family on an inpatient unit. The research started with the hospitalization of one mother-daughter pair in November 1954, and increased to three mother-daughter pairs during the next year. The initial hypothesis of the study—with its dyadic focus—was that a symbiotic attachment, both positive and negative, between mother and offspring was the basis of schizophrenia. A mutual overdependency—a psychological symbiosis—between mother and daughter was the essential ingredient in the emergence of the offspring’s schizophrenia. This hypothesis was generated from the theoretical and clinical milieu at the Menninger Foundation, and the concept of the “schizophrenogenic mother” that practitioners such as Frieda Fromm-Reichman (1950) were espousing. The mother-offspring symbiosis was seen by Bowen to be a process of undifferentiation in the dyad.

One year into the research project, in December 1955, the first father was added to the mother-daughter pairs. Bowen and his research colleagues began to see the role of the father as the outsider in the father-mother-offspring triadic configuration. This led to Bowen’s eventual refinement of the concept of the emotional triangle.¹ He, and his research associates, modified their initial hypothesis: “From seeing schizophrenia as a process between mother and patient to an orientation of seeing schizophrenia as a manifestation of a distraught family” (Rakow, 2004, p. 10). In 1957 Bowen wrote:

It was more than a state of two people responding and reacting to each other in a specific way but more a state of two people living and acting and being for each other. There was a striking lack of definiteness in the boundary of the problem as well as lack of ego boundaries in the symbiotic pairs. The relationship was more than two people with a problem involving chiefly each other; it appeared to be more a dependent fragment of a larger family problem.

(1978, p. 10)

The shift, from the dyadic focus to the triad to the entire family in 1955, was the beginning of Bowen’s conception of the family as an emotional system or unit. This became part of the foundation of Bowen’s concept of the undifferentiated family ego mass—later renamed the nuclear family system—the emotional oneness or emotional stuck-togetherness of the nuclear family in which there was a schizophrenic offspring.

The undifferentiated-ego-mass was, according to Bowen, a term that mixed the languages of biology (undifferentiated), psychoanalytic (ego), and physics (mass). Just as he had used the term “triad” for a number of years before switching to the term “emotional triangle” in order to communicate to the outside research world, the psychoanalytic community, Bowen made a similar switch when he used the term “undifferentiatedego-mass,” and then changed it to the “nuclear family emotional system.” In 1965 he wrote:

I have used the term “undifferentiated family ego mass” to refer to the family emotional oneness. The term has certain inaccuracies but it aptly describes the over-all family dynamics, and no other term has been effective in communicating the concept to others. I conceive of a fused cluster of egos of individual family members with a common ego boundary. Some egos are more completely fused into the mass than others. Certain egos are intensely involved in the family mass during emotional stress and are relatively detached at other times.

(1978, pp. 122–123)

In a seminal paper published in 1966, “The Use of Family Theory in Clinical Practice,” Bowen wrote: “The term family undifferentiated ego mass has been more utilitarian than accurate. Precisely defined, the four words do not belong together, but the term has been most effective of all in communicating the concept so that others might ‘hear’” (1978, p. 160). It was not until 1971 that the concept that describes the emotional family oneness was renamed the nuclear family emotional system (1978, p. 203).

During the research years at NIMH Bowen wrote that he began to think about terms for his understanding the concept of differentiation of self in biological terms: “The term ‘differentiation’ was similar to the differentiation of cells in embryology and biology. The terms ‘fusion’ and ‘cutoff’ describe the way cells agglutinate and the way they separate to start new colonies of cells” (1988, p. 362). He saw similar patterns occurring in close family relationships.

It is clear that Bowen had an incipient view of the family regarding the emotional system, differentiation of self, the family projection process, and multigenerational transmission process, rooted in the evolutionary biological perspective of the human phenomenon. His earliest reference to the incipient concepts of differentiation of self and the family projection process occurs in 1957, in his first published paper, “Treatment of Family Groups with a Schizophrenic Member”:

Considerable effort goes into helping the individual define his own ‘self’ and to differentiate self from others. A common observation is a kind of family projection process in which the family weakness is projected to the patient who resists ineffectively and then accepts it.

(1978, p. 12)

In 1985, Bowen outlined the evolution of his thinking in a letter to a colleague:

It is factual that I had “been thinking extended family for years before the start of the formal research in July 1954; that I had developed my own method of family therapy during the summer of 1955 (I had never heard about it before); that my already worked out plan for family therapy was operationalized in November 1955 when my first full family was admitted.”… After the NIMH research began in 1954 I developed the FAMILY DIAGRAM. That was essential. Every principle developed in research was tried on my own nuclear and extended family after 1954.… I had an active family therapy practice after December 1955. The framework of my basic theoretical concepts was developed in the 1956–57 period of NIMH. Extended family ideas were in everything I did. I moved from NIMH to [Georgetown University Medical Center] in July 1959. Extended family ideas were in everything I did.

(Boyd, 2007, pp. 204–205)

Colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health Whose Research and Theoretical Ideas Were Congruent With Bowen’s

Bowen hired Lewis Hill, a psychiatrist, to be a consultant to the research project in 1955. He wrote:

The investigation of the three-generation idea began in 1955 with the statement of our consultant, Dr. Lewis Hill, that it requires three generations for schizophrenia to develop. This was an extension of the thinking in his book, Psychotherapeutic Interventions in Schizophrenia (1955). Dr. Hill died in February 1958 while this paper was being written, but I believe the three-generation idea as expressed here is a fairly accurate represe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Editor
• Contributors
• Part I Theoretical Perspectives on the Concept of Differentiation of Self
• Part II Differentiation of Self in the Therapist’s Own Family
• Part III Differentiation of Self in Clinical Practice
• Part IV Researching Differentiation of Self
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• Index