Author | Catherine Rakow, Board Member
My journey through the archives, beginning in 1993, led to the desire to speak with others working alongside Dr. Bowen on his NIMH family study project. Those who had actually been on the scene during that exploration and development of theory. Mrs. Betty Basamania and Dr. Warren Brodey were still alive in 2002 when they came to the Western Pennsylvania Family Center in Pittsburgh for a two- day seminar on their experience on that project. Videos of those days are available at the Center and are on loan at the National Library of Medicine. Soon after, Dr. Brodey and I met at The Bowen Center in Washington, DC. Our meeting centered around a review of documents in the archives that had no author, and I suspected were written by Dr. Brodey. Our discussion over those materials centered on Dr. Brodey’s reflections on participating on the project and his perceptions of the families and the administration. It was recorded and is available in four segments on the website in the Oral History section. Dr. Brodey is currently living in Norway. He is available at wbrodey@gmail.com for anyone interested in learning more of his life’s work.
My interest has been and remains in the possibilities offered by interviews with those professionals who were contemporaries of Dr. Bowen. Those who were either on-site as Dr. Bowen developed his theory, such as Brodey and Basamania, or those who were colleagues and can give insight to how Bowen was heard by others. Adding to the historical record on the development of theory will serve the future well.
Since 2010, I have traveled beside Andrea Schara as she developed her own ideas about how Bowen theory has changed many lives as well as how people adopted the theory, made it their own, and worked to extend the theory. I first did this as Chair of the Archives, Acquisitions, and Oral History committee working with Andrea and others to develop a manual of policies and practices for her endeavor. Katherine Kott was very helpful in pointing to the Stanford Oral History Training Manual as an example. Ms. Schara became chair of the Oral History Project in 2013 and continued her intrepid effort to collect these oral histories. I returned to hands-on work with the oral history interviews in 2017 through August 2018. Gathering needed materials for posting the interviews offered the pleasant experience of getting to know interviewees through this process. It was a delightful experience as I became personally acquainted with many people who knew the theory, actively used it in their life, and were willing to speak to that. I gained firsthand knowledge of their strengths, their resilience, their humor, and a number of times got new ideas for my own thinking or a historical fact or two useful for my writing efforts.
Author | Andrea Schara, TMBAP Board Member
In 2011, I begin to interview people for my website who had a serious, often life changing, relationship with Dr. Bowen. I wanted to find out how Dr. Bowen impacted so many people, peaking their interest in family systems theory. What was he doing? What was so different about what he said or did that people would change, often leaving individual thinking, to move towards systems thinking?
Others were interested in the history of how Dr. Bowen’s relationships influenced people. Catherine Rakow interviewed two important people from the National Institute of Health research days. Robert Cohen and Warren Brodey. You can hear these initial oral history interviews on the website.
I suggested to the Board of The Murray Bowen Archives Project that there might be at least 60 people who could talk about how Bowen influenced them and that could increase our knowledge of the man, Murray Bowen and of the way he lived his theory. This multi-year project could attract a PhD student interested in doing research on the origins and spread of the theory.
Joanne Bowen, the first president of the TMBAP Board, thought this might be a good idea for research. She had a relationship with a PhD student, Ellen Chapman, who transcribed some of these interviews. Ani Klaus and now Kimberly Capehart transcribe the interviews. Currently over 50 interviews have been recorded and 24 of them are now on the website.
These stories enhance the understanding of the theory, showing show the ways in which Bowen’s relationships with people promoted their broader interest in human behavior. Some of the interviews are with individuals who took the ideas and developed research projects. Others tested out new clinical insights and methods. There is also interest in expanding the theory towards a science of human behavior by connecting human behavior with the life processes found in other social species.
“Those who know what the family emotional system is understand that bringing a different way of seeing human behavior can itself produces changes within the system.”
Catherine Rakow has been involved from the very beginning, organizing and editing the transcriptions of the audio interviews, obtaining publishing permission for the TMBAP website, selecting photographs, and summarizing the interviews. This year she retired from this work and will be greatly missed. If we are fortunate, she will write a book about all she has learned doing years of research and organizing boxes of Bowen’s files at the National Library of Medicine. Catherine has earned my very deep gratitude for her volunteer work.
Absolutely none of this would be possible without the financial support of many people who have supported the enormous effort to bring the Murray Bowen Collections to the public. Those who support this effort know how important knowledge about the family as system is to the all of us, the world we live in, and future generations.
Those who know what the family emotional system is understand that bringing a different way of seeing human behavior can itself produces changes within the system. These interviews of professionals testify to the impact new knowledge has on behavior. The interviews allow you to hear people speak to the ways in which the relationship with Dr. Bowen changed their lives. Dr. Bowen had a method of interacting with people that challenged the old emotional system, allowing people to be more aware of the automatic nature of human behavior. Family systems theory is built on Bowen’s years of observing families, and seeing how the system worked. These interviews reveal a great deal about how Murray Bowen “lived theory.”