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Dr. Bowen Talking to the Special Postgraduate Program, Tape VB0434, Part One from TMBAP on Vimeo.
Dr. Bowen addresses the importance of relationships to mankind calling them basic to the human condition. There is always a relationship to somebody even in survival level families he asserts. From June 1984.
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– I was just trying to work on psychiatric problems as they came up. And psychiatric problems always involved some kind of a relationship with some kind of a person called an expert. And all kinds of things went on between the patient and the expert that’s called a therapist. And what was the nature of the things that went on? And that is still there, and it’s gonna be there forever, I think. Because I think relationships are that important. I think they’re that basic to mankind. I’m thinking that has to do sort of with that first question today about what you do with… with survival level chaotic families. And the relationship is always there, and that’s basic to the family movement, basic in the whole family thinking. That’s basic even in those situations in which you depend mostly on drugs. The relationship is still there. There are people who say they depend on other things for the therapy, but the relationship with somebody is still there, it’s always there and will be there. And what are the characteristics of a relationship? What is a calming relationship? What is one that stirs up the organism? What are the two ways for decreasing anxiety? When you’re talking about survival level families, you’re talking about decreasing the anxiety. And on a very basic level, you do it through relationships or through drugs, or a combination of the two. And what is the characteristic of those that you do with the relationships? And I would say, on a very basic level, people are using the model between a mother and an infant, and that says an awful lot in just few words, but that is something about which everybody knows something. In other words, what would a mother do to calm the anxiety or the crying in an infant? That’s mostly an instinctual thing and most mothers know what to do about it. So that takes relationships back to a real instinctual level. And then there are a lot of things that you do in a relationship, but in that mother/infant relationship there’s an awful lot of relief of anxiety that gets in that. And that has to do with your relationship with the family, ’cause a family will come to you with certain people in the family who are more spokesmen for the family, and who comes as the spokesman and their going to be seeking the help of an expert who is suppose to know, and then the relationship that they have between that family member and that expert determines an awful lot of what’s gonna happen. And when you’re dealing with that relationship I would say the closer you can come to being factual by putting the emphasis on what can become rather than what did happen, that is putting the emphasis on what is positive about it instead of what’s negative. But you dare not be a liar about what has happened. Which has to do with, that’s an awful lot of what people do, what parents do in relationships with children. ‘Cause a lot of the time their damn liars and particularly when somebody gets psychiatric symptoms, they’ve had experience with all kinds of parents, and all kinds of relationships, and I’ve always taken a model for that, from that that comes from the most impaired people. And the most impaired people have been there and back in terms of having to deal with unpredictable relationships. And then if you want the ultimate in the kind of thing that can happen between an infant and a mother, you go back and pick up what’s the ultimate that can happen with a schizophrenic person. A person who becomes schizophrenic is one who has been done in by so many relationship things, you wouldn’t believe. So that that impaired person is skeptical about everything. They expect every relationship is going to be like the last, which is fueled with all kinds of pretending, misrepresentation, lies, unpredictability, and all that. So when you’re dealing with any of these relationships, particularly on the lowest level person, but on up to you and me and anybody else, although everybody has had a degree of it. So when you get in a relationship, you do absolutely the ultimate in predictability, in being what you say you’re gonna be, and in carefully saying what you can’t be, which they’ve never had before. So that to me is the absolute ultimate in any relationship.