Family Thoughts

This book is a compilation of five papers published in two journals Family Systems Forum and Family Systems: A Journal of Natural Systems Thinking in Psychiatry between 2008 and 2013. These journals are dedicated to exploring the theory of the family developed by Dr. Murray Bowen (1913-1990). Bowen was one of the leaders in the emergence of family systems theory and therapy beginning in the 1950s. Bowen came to understand that much of human behavior is a product of the family unit and has a function for the family unit. The papers in this volume explore how beliefs - worldviews philosophies values goals principles although emerging in an individual brain can be regarded as a product of the family unit and have a function for the family unit. Case studies include Dietrich Bonhoeffer Henry David Thoreau Walter Inglis Anderson Robert Lowell and Jean Stafford.