In this opening clip of the conference, Dr. Bowen describes the process of orientation that went into his initial research at NIH. He outlines the background knowledge that led him to a different orientation about the human being, which included drawing on the fields of biology, biochemistry, psychology, sociology, psychoanalysis, genetics, immunology, and all the social sciences. Learning about self was cardinal to his approach when he went into family research, and as a result, he began to track down his own personal genealogy.
Videos, The Conference on Aging
This video series is from a talk Dr. Bowen gave in Lynchburg, VA, on November 5, 1985, from the Conference on Aging. Among the topics Dr. Bowen discusses are the impact of aging on functioning, relating to family members with dementia, and the opportunities that present themselves when caring for an aging parent.
In this clip, Dr. Bowen talks about how he became interested in learning more than the average person about his extended family. He highlights the large number of families of origin (1024) and genetic beings that each of us comes from in just the last ten generations, or 250 years. Dr. Bowen explains that this is a “giant complex of inter-relatedness, and one has to start somewhere.”