Family Systems Therapy

Family systems therapy, also called Bowenian family therapy, is an approach to psychotherapy developed chiefly by Murray Bowen, one of a number of American clinicians who began observing and treating whole families together starting in the 1940s and early 1950s, alongside the 1942 founding of the American Association of Marriage Counselors. It treats the family, not the individual, as the unit of treatment, holding that a person's symptoms and functioning are best understood as products of emotional patterns and differentiation within the family system across generations, rather than as an isolated individual disorder.