Bowen's model of family therapy is perhaps most distinctive for its depth of evaluation beyond symptoms in the present.  Its focus on emotional processes over the generations and on individuals' differentiation within their systemic context offers family therapists a multi-level view that has usually been reserved for psychodynamic therapies.  Bowen's model pays attention to the emotional interaction of therapists and their clients and expects that the process of therapy must in some way be applied to the therapists' own lives, so that they are able to remain meta to the client family system.

A number of Bowenian therapists acknowledge that the wider focus of Bowen's model can be a drawback in that many clients want only to address symptom relief in the nuclear family (Young, 1991).  For the Bowenian therapist, symptom reduction is seen only as the ground work from which families can proceed less anxiously towards working on detriangling and improved levels of differentiation.

Herein lies a clear danger of discrepancies in client and therapist goals.

While Bowenian therapy has been embraced by some leading feminist therapists, such as Betty Carter and Harriet Goldhor Lerner, it has also received its share of criticism from a feminist perspective.

Deborah Leupnitz (1988) points out that Bowen, along with other male family therapy pioneers, has paid rather too much attention to the mother's contribution to symptom development in the child.  Some support for this can be found by scanning the index to Kerr and Bowen (1988), where 'fathers' do not warrant a category yet 'mothers' are referenced in relation to families of schizophrenics, levels of differentiation in the child, and their role in triangles (Kerr and Bowen, 1988: 395).  [The index to Bowen's own collected papers, Family Therapy in Clinical Practice, however, includes one reference to 'fathers' and none to 'mothers': Eds.] A perceived over-investment by a mother in her child is seen as a sign of undifferentiation.

Unlike the current feminist therapists who use the Bowenian model, Murray Bowen (along with many of his Georgetown colleagues) failed to contextualise maternal behaviour.

Patriarchal assumptions about male / female roles and family organisation are not acknowledged or critiqued, which leaves women vulnerable to having their socially prescribed roles pathologised.  Women are readily labelled as 'over concerned', and their active, relational role in families too easily labelled as 'fused' and 'undifferentiated'.  There is no questioning of societal norms that can be seen to '[school] females into undifferentiation by teaching them always to put others' needs first' (Leupnitz, 1988: 43).

The women's project in family therapy asserts that a model such as Bowen's pressures the woman to 'back off' while placating and courting the distant male (Carter et al., 1988).

Carter asserts that this is not only biased against women but disrespectful of men since the model assumes men's limitations in terms of emotional engagement in therapy and family relationships.  An ongoing challenge for feminist Bowenian therapists is to reconstruct a therapy language of intimacy and attachment that is not misused to imply dysfunction (Bograd, 1987; Carter et al., 1988).

Another criticism that flows from the biases of Bowen's 'male defined' terminology, is that his is a therapy lacking in attention to feelings (Luepnitz, 1988).

It is asserted that Bowen's therapy focuses on being rational and objective in relation to emotional processes, which relegates to a low priority the expression of emotions in therapy.  My own experience of this model, with its invitation to explore the 'tapestry' of one's family across the generations, is that it is an emotionally intense therapy.

While Bowen may emphasise the goal of helping the client learn about their family's emotional processes, in practice it is the experience of the emotions, embedded in family of origin relationships that is a key motivator for the client to undertake family of origin work.  I recall Betty Carter, in asking a man about his relationship with his own father, tapping deeply into emotions that motivated him to make changes in his ways of relating.