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Addictions and Family Systems, Tape One, Part Four from TMBAP on Vimeo.
This clip is the fourth in a series selected from tapes of the “Addictions and Family Systems” conference held in Green Bay, WI, in 1990. In April 1990, six months before his death, Dr. Bowen begins the conference by describing his Odyssey in developing a science of human behavior that would one day replace Freudian Theory.
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– Now we’ll switch off to some details about the relationship between two parents and their kids. And how do you figure that the parents can have a whole bunch of kids, and they can have one who’s headed straight for the schizophrenia or worse, and they can have several that are in the middle of the scale, and they can have one that’s way up the scale. What did these parents do? If you don’t believe me, just go out there and ask those people. And ask them, “How do you figure that the same parents “can have this wide spread of people?” But people there it is. How did it get there? You can ask people about that. Mothers are probably more influencing because the ovum starts inside the mothers’ body. The ovum was startedwith sperm cell inside the mothers body. So the mother is on the spot with this because this new form of life started inside mother. everyone born. My original hypothesis went like this, then after the child was born a more normal child grows up both emotionally and physically. The abnormal child grows up physically but not emotionally, and they remain attached forever. There’s a whole lot more to that and that has to do with the kind of attachment between the mother and the father. And you’ve been aware of the difference in society right now. Because if either one don’t like it, just squabble off and buy another one, and if they do that then they run into problems with the new one, so swap the new one out and buy another one. And become a Liz Taylor or somebody like that. You just go through going from one to another to another. Now anytime you bring a twosome together, you’re gonna run into togetherness problems. Can’t you figure out a way to deal with it, with the other. Without forcing your will on ’em. Can’t you listen just a little bit to the other without trying to force your way into either view of the world? I’d say the female is more vulnerable than the male. Except when the female is blindly directed by the male and the male is a jerk. So it can go either way. So when the female says, “it’s not my responsibility” they are saying, “I think that is the male I married, “well, what, what, what, what, what.” it’s okay if they say so, but don’t go around and act it. In other words, the female is up to the male, and the male is up to the female, if they’re grown up. But if they’re gonna be children then neither one is up to the other, and you scream at ’em, or get your gun and shoot ’em, doing whatever you want to. That’s the way society goes. So I’m not trying to sell you a view point, all I know is that is that it’s usual or people do it more in theory. And people, how you think, has to do with what you do in therapy. You cannot cut your brain out and go do therapy. If your brain is gonna do the therapy then say so, say so, my feelings direct my therapy. And we’re all them theories for once. But anyway, one of the things that I got intrigued with this business, how can the same parents have all these different results? And there they are, they’re out there all the time. You know ’em, you’ve seen ’em. How you gonna get there, how you gonna get there, without your own thinking? How you gonna get there without systems ideas? I don’t think you can, I think you just put in words, you know words to use but you don’t know the thinking that goes with it. But anyway, that’s where I’ve been. And I do believe that these ideas will eventually replace Freud. I’m aware that most people don’t have an opportunity to unlearn Freud. And if you unlearn Freud, there you stand in the face of society, as naked as you can be. So you better learn new theory before you start getting rid of Freud or you gonna use Freud all up and down, and the new theory does not go with Freud. It goes with Darwin, and systems. You can have it either way, but you can’t have both, because if you put Freud in then you do not have Darwin. He wants to know how you differentiate a self. That’s probably a buzz bomb. So skip it. You know how that goes Back in about 1962 I wrote out 21 pages on differentiation of self. You know the feedback I got? “Give me a copy, give me a copy.” I said, “absolutely not, you write your own.” And you know I lost the damn thing. and it’s still in my pile. But this is why I’ve been allergic to putting it out because people memorize it and then they say, “I memorized it and I differentiated a self.” and they never thought for themselves. So that’s why I started people back to reading all kinds of stuff. I back to the Greeks, do you know what it means? “Hell we didn’t, we didn’t.” Originated. I mean you could have people argue about Maslow. Maslow was a, he done some great writing, he was in a concentration camp in Europe, came to the United States after World War II. I’m pretty sure it was in a concentration camp. But he introduced the idea of self actualization. One day all it has to do with a technique, you gonna apply somebody else’s technique and become actualized? Not in my book. In other words, ya gotta know the difference between actualization and differentiation. Differentiation has another concept with it which is called fusion. And there is a concept that goes with two, three or four people operating as one, Which is absolutely positive in our society. How in the hell you gonna let they, any kind of a public representative, that’s not either a Republican or a Democrat you can go either way. So all Democrats supposed to be together and all Republicans supposed to be together. So we do, the concept of fusion is the opposite of differentiation. So any person has a choice of moving either way. And one you’ll hear more and more about. Of course differentiation has to do with physical things. Physiological things. Psychological things. And people you don’t think all of these, you know, psychological , maybe a little bit. It isof the human you can get your hands on, but you know what you do? Then you end up telling the other how to differentiate a self, and they end up doing it because you said so, and that ain’t differentiation.