Murray Bowen was born in 1913 in Tennessee and died in 1990.

He trained as a psychiatrist and originally practised within the psychoanalytic model.

At the Menninger Clinic in the late 1940s, he had started to involve mothers in the investigation and treatment of schizophrenic patients.  His devotion to his own psychoanalytic training was set aside after his move to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in 1954, as he began to shift from an individual focus to an appreciation of the dimensions of families as systems.

At the NIMH, Bowen began to include more family members in his research and psychotherapy with schizophrenic patients.

In 1959 he moved to Georgetown University and established the Georgetown Family Centre (where he was director until his death).  It was here that his developing theory was extended to less severe emotional problems.

Between 1959 and 1962 he undertook detailed research into families across several generations.  Rather than developing a theory about pathology, Bowen focused on what he saw as the common patterns of all 'human emotional systems'.  With such a focus on the qualitative similarities of all families, Bowen was known to say frequently, 'There is a little schizophrenia in all of us' (Kerr and Bowen, 1988).

In 1966, Bowen published the first 'orderly presentation' of his developing ideas (Bowen, 1978: xiii).  Around the same time he used his concepts to guide his intervention in a minor emotional crisis in his own extended family, an intervention which he describes as a spectacular breakthrough for him in theory and practice (Bowen, 1972 in Bowen, 1978).

In 1967, he surprised a national family therapy conference by talking about his own family experience, rather than presenting the anticipated formal paper.  Bowen proceeded to encourage students to work on triangles and intergenerational patterns in their own families of origin rather than undertaking individual psychotherapy.

From this generation of trainees have come the current leaders of Bowenian Therapy, such as Michael Kerr at the Georgetown Family Center, Philip Guerin at the Center for Family Learning, Betty Carter at the Family Institute of Westchester, and Monica McGoldrick at the [Multicultural] Family Institute of New Jersey.

While the core concepts of Bowen's theory have changed little over two decades, there have been significant expansions: the focus on life cycle stages (Carter and McGoldrick, 1980, 1988) and the incorporation of a feminist lens (Carter, Walters, Papp, Silverstein, 1988; Lerner, 1983; Bograd, 1987).