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Dr. Bowen Talking to the Special Postgraduate Program, Tape VB0477, Part Three from TMBAP on Vimeo.
This clip features Murray Bowen discussing the advantages of taking a more neutral position and how this impacts thinking. He also looks at his journey from Freud to a science of human behavior concluding systems was the only way to get there. From December 9, 1987 and September 14, 1988.
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– This summer’s been loaded with me doing probably the most intense summary of the program at the family center that I have done in the past decade or two. And this had to do with the – For those of you who haven’t seen it, Mike did a summery of that presentation I did at third Thursday back in February. Which is sort of a microcosm of what I’ve been doing. Mike did a pretty good job of putting it together. Except I’ve been into it in far more detail. And the net result has been, an unusual focus on theory. Probably better than I had anticipated in the 1980s. Now I don’t know what’s played into that. I believe that the important part in it as been the, having a neutral attitude about theory. I think that is the one that has done it. ‘Cause God knows I’ve worked at it. And that would be, you don’t care weather it’s accepted as a theory or not. When you get to the place you don’t care it goes better. That changes your whole attitude. So that that would be a guess about what has happened. Back in the 1950s, I was guessing that I might be 200 years before Freud was replaced, because the very bases of the theory was something that mankind had run around for centuries. And that was the notion of applying system’s ideas to the human himself. And I started that damned thing in the 1940s. And as far as I could tell, there was no way to move from Freud towards science without getting into systems. And you know it was a fascinating idea I present just a little bit to these trainees. And they said, “You observe systems.” Pfft, observed it in a book. He had no way to observe it in people. And that gets to be the way of the teaching. It’s conveyed in these, at the family center. You observe the what. Detachment. You observe through detachment. What is detachment? Explain that if you can. But anyway. That all came out of books. Reading, reading, reading, reading. Then it came to me, this notion of evolution is important. I was trying to get out of Freud and move towards science. I didn’t have any complaint about Freud. Certain things it couldn’t do. But I was just wondering about science. And these people said, “You observed.” Oh, brother. That is an idea that people get. Observed with what? You observe with your head. Your head is reprogrammed from a library. It don’t observe the bricks over there and reprogram from that. It’s reprogrammed out of a library. Anyway I developed that thing. And then came, I put it together with family. And then I was gonna name it. What is this theory? And I had reservations about using proper names. Good reservations. ‘Cause I’m writing for history and not for the next decade. ‘Cause I was thinking then that this wouldn’t be acceptable for two centuries, because when you add systems thinking to human there is a big resistance to it. And I was thinking when you add systems to the human, you gonna be two centuries. You add systems to it unless you put it in evolution. And the two together, boy it’s big. So time has passed. By 1957 I was saying, “If evolution ever becomes a science, then the family world will be able to be a science to.” It was that much allied with evolution. In naming it, I called it, “Family Systems”. Family because that was my last addition to it, and systems because that was the original thinking. We know what the world has done to it. That means you see the family, you see that thing you put on the board as a system. You know, this one and this one, and this one, and subsystems. And that’s what the world has done to it. Let people do what want to with it, I don’t care. But it doesn’t have to do with changing my life direction. I’m gonna keep on doing what I’ve been doing, trying to overhaul the George Town Program as much as I can to be in sync with it. And you know I’m not trying to lead anybody else’s life. I’m not trying to tell nobody how to lead theirs. If they want to change their lives, well change it. If they don’t, well don’t. Who gives a good god-damn. And you know it’s my thesis that this attitude has made it possible for the world to hear a different theory faster than it would have heard otherwise, I believe.