A much-needed update to one of the most significant family therapy theories of the past century.Murray Bowen (1931–1990) was the first to study the family in a live-in setting and describe specific details about how families function as systems. Despite Bowen theory being based on research begun more than seventy years ago, the value of viewing human beings as profoundly emotionally-driven creatures and human families functioning as emotional units is more relevant...

The concepts of Murray Bowen, one of the founders of family therapy and the originator of family systems theory, are brought together here in an integrative fashion.Michael Kerr (who worked with Bowen for many years) and Bowen propose that the enormously complex task of evaluating a clinical family can be orderly when it is grounded in family systems theory.Using family diagrams and case studies, the book is devoted to an elegant explication of Bowen theory...