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Dr. Bowen Talking to the Special Postgraduate Program, Tape VB0434, Part Five from TMBAP on Vimeo.
Dr. Bowen talks about how his inability to resolve intense relationships with psychotic level people led him to think in terms of family. Instead of the person developing an intense relationship with Dr. Bowen and staying stuck he shifted his focus so that the intense relationship stayed within the family not with him. That is where it could then be resolved. From June 1984.
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– `- it has a certain percentage of these. I was very good at resolving transference in neurotic level problems. I could make them go away, you know, they’d just disappear, they ain’t there no more. But not with psychotic level things, because you would get to the point of trying to resolve that point, and these people run away from it, they leave it unresolved. They would want me to stay forever in that position, without resolving the problem. So they’d sign out and go home, I wouldn’t have any thing to do with it. I thought, “Boy this is a hell of a way to do it.” I had about, oh at least 50 people like that, that I’d maintain with brief contact, and that would be just supporting… that contract with them, which was observed ‘breach of promise’. Which it says, I’ll be here forever if you want me. And they would go off and go away and stay, come back once a year, twice a year, once every three years, however often it was. But the relationship never got resolved. So, I thought, “this is a pretty good living, what the hell.” I was rather good at that, but I don’t mind these people being out there emotionally attached. It didn’t take much out of me. I could do it with a letter a month, a letter every three months, but I thought, “those people would be better off, “the world would be better off, “rather than providing an outside person for this, “the world would be better off if they could relate within their own families.” and that, honest to goodness, was the thing that got me started with families. Was if I could work it so that instead of the intense relationship with me, they could keep it within their own families. And all of, that’s all I was trying to do. And you know, I was doing okay with these neurotic level things. I just wanted to find a way out of psychotic level stuff. But then when I got into this, boy, a new world opened up. Then I changed my ideas about it. Now within this there’s certain characteristics of the way it goes. Certain characteristics of this one, this one, this one, the parts that all these people play. But, that is one of the now, to be able to do this, most therapists are not able to do it. What they will do if they’ve had enough training in individual stuff, that you’ll unwittingly get yourself involved in that. And you get yourself involved in a relationship with this person and then what the hell did you do. You either let it stay forever or you get mad at them and kick them out. That is where the mental health profession is these days. You get mad at people, you get into, you wouldn’t have to kick ’em out if you didn’t get into an intense relationship with them. So you get into an intense relationship with them, and then you can’t stand it anymore than their mothers could stand it. So you kick ’em out, let ’em go home. And that is the story out there in the mental health world. You kick ’em out of one clinic and they go to another. And they get kicked out of another, and they keep just rotating clinics. Or they keep rotating therapist to therapist. So when that happens, that is the unsuccessful resolution of an intense relationship.