Interview of Dr. Bowen, Green Bay, WI—The Premier Online Video

– [Announcer] This is Inquiry, a public affairs presentation of the WFRV WJMN-TV News Departments.

– Hello, I’m Tom Joles. My guest today came all the way from Washington, D.C. to talk about family systems. He is Dr. Murray Bowen. Dr. Bowen has had about 50 papers published, he’s been working hard over the years. He is currently a clinical professor and the director of the Georgetown Family Center at the Georgetown University Medical Center. When we talk about family systems, Dr. Bowen, what exactly do you mean?

– Ah, that’s a good way to put it. A systems way the world has become very simplistic about some systems. In other words they can be a little system and a bigger and a bigger and a bigger and a bigger and a bigger and it just gets bigger and bigger and gets all the way to the universe. So when people talk about systems they generally define something in a small area, but when I’m talking about systems it’s in a bigger and a bigger and a bigger area. In other words mankind is one of the living forms on planet earth. It reproduces, it’s life goes in cycles. Life changes a little with each cycle, that you call evolution. And our family that we live in, in this generation, is generations deep and it goes generations into the future. And with a systems orientation you can define pretty well how families behave and how they’re gonna behave into the future. That has to do with you and me and all that good stuff.

– Well what does family structure mean to me though as a person?

– For most people family structure means the current nuclear family, parents and children plus one or two generations of ancestors.

– There are two schools of thinking, there is the family systems thinking and the individual thinking, correct? And for a long time the individual was the accepted form.

– [Murray] Still is.

– Still is, so you’re a maverick?

– Sort of, have been all my life. I was one of the ones that helped move from individual thinking, psychoanalytic thinking, into systems thinking. I’ve done more to define that then anybody else. So in that sense I’ve been a maverick and those of us who are in family work are still sort of mavericks alongside individual therapy.

– Individual thinking, if I’m a schizophrenic how would the individual system, or the individual thinking person diagnose my problem, what is it caused from?

– Individual thinking focuses more on the symptoms in the patient and I would say family thinking is more interested in the past generations that goes into the creation of that. And an approach to it can be to approach the individual, but there’s also an approach in past generations. There’s another one in that it’s where current psychiatry is. Psychiatry right now would say that schizophrenia is mostly a product of the biology of the past, it doesn’t have to do with the family. It has to do with the genetic biological composition and it’s going to happen anyway. And biological thinking would say the behavior of man can be influenced by the introduction of drugs. That is one way of thinking. And I would say the mass of psychiatry has gone in that direction. But even the biological people use something that has to do with family in it.

– We have a lot of fancy talking going on right now. To put it all in very simple terms aren’t you saying that if someone has a problem it’s about time we look at the people who surround that person, the mother, the father, the brother, the sister, because all of these problems are interrelated?

– All of those things plus the biology we inherit out of the past and we take with us, the genetic part is in it too.

– Alright, and that plays a very big part in your mind?

– Yeah, in other words it cannot be ignored. I don’t think you can say that schizophrenia is biological, I think that is inaccurate, and I think it’s inaccurate to say that it is related to the family. I think all of it plays a part.

– Alright if you were to pick your parents if you had the chance again to pick your parents, what kind of parents would you pick and what kind of characteristics would you look for in them so they could bring you up as a healthy human being? I’m talking about emotionally, socially, physically?

– A long time ago I defined a state, a way of being, a way of thinking which I call differentiation of self which is poorly understood. And how does one go about changing ones own way of thinking to bring about a better functioning state? I don’t know if I’ve chose parents, I’ve asked that question hundreds of times and I ask people what would you choose, and they’d say I’d choose what I got That’s the way people are.

– [Tom] You’re kind of a foxy guy aren’t ya?

– But if you chose the absolute ideal and you had a, sort of a premise to become an ideal person, I would say if you were born to well-differentiated parents you would have a better chance of becoming ideal, but who wants to be ideal?

– I guess so, there are problems even with that.

– Would you rather be ideal or would you rather have fun?

– With your theories it seems to me like they’re rather fatalistic at times because if I’m born into a certain family and there are some genetic flaws and maybe the family has some emotional flaws, social flaws, I’m getting ripped off and there’s nothing I can really do about it is there?

– Any family, any family that you pick has flaws. Any family has flaws. Life is made up of dozens of different directions, you know, you gotta choose go right or go left. And if you choose leftyou got problems with what would have been. And life is just filled with decisions like that. So you never come out with the right decisions.

– Well why are some of those people veering left then?

– Well they chose that, I mean life is like that.

– [Tom] So there are cerebral decisions to go off track?

– Yeah, they don’t know of.

– I don’t understand that, why would anyone want to do that?

– They don’t want to do it they just choose that.

– Can you explain that?

– And I think man chooses that more out of his subjectivity and out of his feelings than out of his thinking being. In other words you’re confronted with something, you know, and you choose I had rather be. Let me put it this way, in a marriage, would you choose the great romance or the practical marriage?

– Are you talking about me personally?

– [Murray] Yeah, or me.

– Or you, okay, I guess the romance is fun for awhile, but the wife also has to get along with you in a practical sense.

– Most people choose, would choose something of the great romance.

– [Tom] Alright.

– They want life to be practical, but they like these long romantic interludes in it.

– What is it about those people then at a very early age who have the ability to decide that they’re gonna go for the practical part of life?

– They miss the romance.

– [Tom] But they’re better adjusted?

– I would say a perfectly adjusted person would probably, by going forward with life, would probably happen onto more romance as a secondary gain. But if you choose romance as a primary gain you’ll probably miss it, most people do. The divorce courts are filled with people who say, the romance is gone out of this marriage I’m gonna try another one.

– [Tom] Quite frequent.

– Right, and if we were real mature people we would choose the practical.

– [Tom] But we’re animals.

– We ain’t born so mature

– Getting back to the systems thinking, tell me what happens when you have a family that seems to be well-adjusted and all of the children achieve a certain amount of success, but there’s that one child who goes astray, who starts using heroine, or drinks excessively. What happens there in the system?

– That’s a beautiful question. That’s par for the course with all families. All families even I think with subhuman families. In any family there’s one who does less well. In the animal world we call that the runt. And the runt is the mother’s constant preoccupation. She would do anything for that kid. And in her effort to do anything for it she makes the problem worse. But mother can’t not try to do the best she can. The world is full of that, schools are full of it, teachers are focusing on ’em trying to get ’em to do better and the more they focus on ’em the worse it is.

– So what do you do with those children?

– Try to help ’em as much as you can and try to help the parents de-focus ’em.

– Alright I have two brothers which means there are three boys in my family. One of my brother was destined to be a runt?

– If you took a biological view, yeah.

– Well that’s the view we’re taking isn’t it?

– [Murray] Yeah, okay.

– Alright.

– Or if you choose what happens in families one person comes out less well than the others. And the family would break its neck to get that one to do better. And those are the ones that get off into alcoholism and drugs and a less productive way of life.

– I’m gonna pin you down on this.

– Okay.

– In just a minute but we have to be interrupted by a commercial.

– Okay.

– We’ll be back in just a few minutes.

– [Murray] Partially paralyzed vocal cords. Welcome back to Inquiry. I’m talking to Dr. Murray Bowen. He is a psychiatrist at the Georgetown Medical School. He is a maverick thinker, can I call you a maverick?

– [Murray] Yeah it’s okay.

– Alright he gave me his permission. He has come up with some new thoughts. The prevalent idea for a long time was something called individual thinking. Now he has come up with something called systems thinking. and briefly for someone who’s just joined us can you differentiate between those two.

– A systems way of thinking has developed a way of thinking which says a psychological problem is in the person of the patient and it conceptualize the problem there and it tries to get it out in terms of a relationship with or drugs in that person. A family way of thinking would say the family is the problem. The family is the problem and the solution. And when you conceptualize the family as part of the problem it becomes more complex, it’s a bigger system. So in general you try to work with the family. The family is the problem, but the family is the strength. A family has more strength than an individual.

– When you see families having problems what are the problems you see most?

– I would say that in a family it is not so much a, they’re people in families who have more strength than others to pull out the family problem. And there are people who are sort of destined to be the problem.

– When you say that does a family that does well does that family always have the strong individual, is that necessary?

– [Murray] Yeah.

– [Tom] Alright, so it’s gonna be mother or father, someone who’s a rock.

– If you have a team of horses there will be one horse that takes the first step and there will be one that follows. And this is so in the human family. That one who makes the decision and makes the move and the others who sort of goes along with it. On an optimum level you would have a family in which one could make a move, and then the other, and then the other, but most people don’t do it that way. You get accustomed to one taking the first step and so you just sort of go along with it.

– You know I see a terrible picture here. How ’bout that family back about, how many years ago, I don’t know, who came into existence and they never had that leader, it seems like you’re gonna have a perpetuating problem where this family will forever be a family of failures because they’ve never had that leader to set an example the first time.

– Any, you can take a group of people who don’t, are never leaders in any family and you put a bunch of non-leaders together and they’ll have one who’ll step off. There will be one who will do it and others who will not follow. That goes back to World War II you know, they used to put together groups of officers to see how one officer relates to the others and there has to be one person who’ll start it off. So if you put all the subs on a football team together–

– You will have a leader there.

– You would have a leader in it.

– Alright, you said having a leader is very important. You also said that every structure has what you called a runt before. Okay now even in the–

– That’s sorta colloquial expression.

– Alright, well can we call it a runt for the time being though for lack of a better word? There is this runt, did the Kennedy’s have runts? If I got to Hyannis am I gonna find runts in the Kennedy family?

– There’s one in every family and I’d say with the Kennedy family it was probably the girl who was a mental defective, I mean that happens too. It would be the child, I’ve written about that, who is the one most likely to do poorly and that would be the only girl among boys, or the only boy among girls. The only one with a physical deformity would be the one who would be the recipient of this, the different one. Sometimes it can be a child who looks exactly like a parent and that’s the one the parent will focus on.

– Alright so if my parents dwelled on me I might have gotten a raw deal in a way.

– [Murray] Right, right, right.

– That seems so odd though it doesn’t make any sense.

– I was talking to a mother about this recently and she says, you don’t understand how it is with mothers. If a mother sees her child in trouble she’s gonna take care of the trouble in the child. I said, up to what age?

– Okay.

– [Murray] And that is the mothering instinct in the mother figure.

– Would it be fair to say that these children who are viewed as runts at first and the parents give them quite a bit of attention when they become adults they do not know how to deal with most situations just because they had the parents there all the time? And in a way that’s why the parents were poor?

– I don’t think you can say that’s why. You could say that is one of the things in it. In other words the parent plays a part in it and the child plays a part too, both of ’em play a part, it just happens, it’s nobody’s fault.

– Alright, you’re a psychiatrist, let’s play a little game here.

– [Murray] Okay.

– You’re gonna come into my house and it’s me and my wife and our children and we’re a total mess. This family is screwed up. What kind of therapy are we gonna get?

– My approach to that would be to, you know to, out of my head I would have some ideas about it then I would ask a lot of questions to get some kind of an idea and I would try to communicate to the family what my idea is about it. And I would try to communicate to the family if you could, might modify this, and might modify this, I think it would go better or something like that.

– Can I tell you that I’m an alcoholic and my wife is shooting heroine, does that help?

-That would be simple. I would say, if you could stop drinking and if she could stop shooting heroine I think it would go better.

– But–

– Put in two ifs.

– Alright, there are two ifs, but under your plan I am an alcoholic because there’s something else in the family that’s disturbing me, correct?

– [Murray] Right, right.

– Alright so aren’t you gonna talk to them before you really talk to me?

– That would come into it too. In other words you’re an alcoholic because so and so and so and so is playing a part in it.

– [Tom] Alright.

– And that would mean they, if you’re gonna quit drinking, that means they’re gonna have to change something.

– Well what do they change though?

– That’s what family sessions about to discover what it is they’re gonna change.

– Ah, so with your thinking when there’s is an alcoholic it’s not the alcoholic’s fault it’s the entire family’s fault and we bring them all into a room and talk, maybe?

– That is helpful within limits. In other words when the people in this family can find out what they’re doing then maybe they can modify it.

– [Tom] Let’s change gears for must a moment.

– Okay.

– You say there are two primary forces in all of us.

– Yeah, one way of thinking, okay let’s leave it at that.

– [Tom] You don’t wanna elaborate?

– Well you could say there are two forces somebody else will say there’s two more, generally there are two conflicting forces in most things.

– [Tom] What are those forces?

– Well one sees it this way, one sees it that way. In American politics we’ve got conservatives and liberals.

– How about the forces of individuality and togetherness though? Aren’t there some people who are motivated when someone else is there to share it with them and other people who can thrive in that?

– There are those, there are those who are motivated to be part of the group and there are others that motivate to work on themselves. And I’d say if you work on self you can become a loner and not a part of the group and you can’t go too far with that because you are a part of the group, you gotta recognize that too. And I would say the healthiest person can be an individual within a group. A good football team is what, best example of that. You can be a highly-qualified individual player and you can also be part of a group.

– Okay, in your mind what determines whether you’re the loner type, individual, or the team player? Is that genetic?

– Vince Lomardi was a genius, he was a genius for bringing together a bunch of geniuses and make ’em pull together, that’s a high-level family.

– You just have to know how to pick out the kids.

– [Murray] That’s what put the Packers on the map, Vince Lomardi.

– You still didn’t answer my question though.

– [Murray]I don’t know what was your question?

– Let’s go on to another one. You said we have to find a good combination of individuality and togetherness to be well-adjusted people.

– Yeah.

– Alright, how do we find that out? How do I know that I have that right combination?

– I don’t know how you know. If you bring two people together in a marriage the husband is gonna be the best example he knows how to be of being a male human being and the wife is gonna do the best job she can do about being a female human being. And if one can be a male human being and can play their position well, the wife can play her position well and if they both play their positions well the doggone family’s gonna turn out okay.

– What happens to the wife who feels a little anxious though because she wants to get close to her husband and he’s an individual?

– In most of those families the husband will get so concerned about his wife’s anxiety that he will put a hell of a lot of time on laying her anxiety.

– [Tom] Oh really, now I thought it would be the other way around. I thought the husband would get anxious himself and feel like this woman is closing in on him.

– [Murray] Well that’s one way, that’s one way of doing it.

– Alright.

– But if the one that gets anxious the other spouse is gonna be focusing on that.

– Alright.

– And then a lot of family energy , you know it’s like a football team, you know, you wonder about how you’re gonna play your position when the guy who’s playing next to you has got a broken foot or something like that.

– Okay, good. More with Dr. Murray Bowen right after this. Welcome back to Inquiry. I’m talking to Dr. Murray Bowen, he’s a psychiatrist from Georgetown University. Let’s get practical for just a moment Dr. Bowen. We’ve been talking systems all along. From the family out in TV land who’s watching this program, what can they do to be more of a family, a unit, a successful family?

– In general in terms of therapy, you’re trying to change the system rather than change a person. And if one person in a family can change the rest of the family will change, that’s one of the big pluses in it. In other words you don’t have to have the sick one in. In other words I’d rather have the best functioning one than the sickest one.

– [Tom] The best functioning one doing what?

– Working on the family problem if they can.

– [Tom] Okay.

– In other words maybe it’s the father who’s so involved at work that he doesn’t have time for it and maybe mother’s more qualified for it. But one of the best functioning people in the family can change it faster than picking up the–

– The weak link?

– The weakling.

– Okay, this person who can function well, how does he change the family, by setting examples, or by nitpicking? Saying you better change because.

– Nitpicking is about the worst way to do it. That is focusing on what’s wrong with it. The best functioning person can usually change it by doing the best job they can do within themselves.

– [Tom] Role models.

– On whatever they do–

– Alright.

– For anything.

– Good, maverick, Dr. Murray Bowen, I appreciate it–

– Okay.

– Enjoyable conversation.

– Okay.

– Have a good trip back. Thank you for watching Inquiry.

– I think.

– [Announcer] Inquiry is a presentation of the WFRV, WJMN-TV News departments and comes to you each week at this time. This program was prerecorded.