Murray Bowen (/ˈboʊən/ BOH-ən; January 31, 1913, in Waverly, Tennessee – October 9, 1990) was an American psychiatrist and a professor in psychiatry at Georgetown University.
Though he had been accepted for a post-military fellowship in surgery at the Mayo Clinic, in 1946 he started at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, as a fellow in psychiatry and personal psychoanalysis.
[5] After defining the field of family therapy he started integrating new concepts with the theory, noting that none of this had previously been addressed in the psychological literature.
[6] Bowen did research on parents who lived with one adult schizophrenic child, which he thought could provide a paradigm for all children.
Bowen criticized psychiatry’s penchant for diagnosing and treating mental illness as of limited usefulness and ultimately a dead end.
Murray Bowen received multiple awards and recognitions, including: He died of lung cancer in 1990.
[10] Bowen wrote about fifty papers, book chapters, and monographs based on his radically new relationships-based theory of human behavior.