Problems of the Aged – Lecture by Dr. Bowen

This talk, from April 1980 by Dr. Murray Bowen, challenges compartmentalized thinking and argues for enlarging systems theory so that human emotional, physiological, genetic, and psychological functioning are understood as parts of one system. Aging is highlighted as one of the tightest “compartments” in clinical thinking. The shift in perspective is from viewing the person as a separate individual to viewing them within the family as a functional unit. This shift is hard because humans default to an individual framework.

Major life events—birth, marriage, graduation, death—are presented as both individual and family events. Thinking “toward the family” requires discipline but adds a new dimension for understanding human life. The speaker explores the idea of an “aging family,” noting that families do not perpetuate themselves indefinitely. Families continue by combining with other families, but even with his process, some become extinct. A fibroblast culture example is used to illustrate limits to biological perpetuation.

Reframing aging as a family issue helps move it out of pathology and into a normal biological process. The talk questions psychological theories that focus solely on an individual lifespan, emphasizing how each person is preceded by many families—sixty-four families of origin in five generations—making family-level thinking different and necessary.

Key Ideas

• The world (and clinical practice) treats human life in rigid compartments; systems theory aims to unify them.

• Aging is typically framed at the level of the individual; the talk shifts focus to the family as a functional unit.

• Births, marriages, graduations, and deaths are both individual events and family events.

• Thinking “toward the family” is not automatic; it requires discipline and changes in understanding.

• The “aging family” has a lifespan; families persist by combining with other families, but some become extinct.

• Biological analogy: cell cultures expand to a limit and then decline; life does not perpetuate itself indefinitely.

• Seeing aging as a family issue moves it from pathology toward a normal biological process.

• Dominant psychological models focus on the individual lifespan; family-systems thinking emphasizes many families of origin (e.g., sixty-four in five generations).

Read the full text below to engage with the arguments and examples in the speaker’s own words.

We have a conference dedicated to Aging in October, 2025. You can find out more here here.

Thank you for your interest in systems

Dave Galloway

dave.galloway@livingsystems.ca

For a Bowen Theory perspective on optimal aging, see: Optimal Aging

 

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Here is the full text of the lecture.

Expanding Systems Theory

I had hoped to have a well ordered presentation for today. I don’t have it.

For the past month, I have been struggling with pondering ways to enlarge systems theory. We live in plundered (?) compartmental, world with little theoretical concepts to explain this little package and a node over here and another one over here.

And was systems theory, someday, this will all go together. I believe that probably in another 50 years, we will have a systems theory which incorporates other systems theory. And it will all be understood as a system. Human emotional functioning, physiological functioning, genetic functioning. The whole thing will be understood as theory and indeed, psychological thinking, which we’ll now regard it’s the standard body of knowledge. I believe one day that that will be also understood. There are facts in it as a system and eventually we’ll get there.

In the clinical world, we have all these compartments. And I think one of the tightest compartments is aging. Now with the scientist (?) life cycle into compartments and we have these little theoretical concepts for understanding.

An Intergenerational transgenerational process

So one of the things I hope to be able to do better here today was to understand ageing as an intergenerational transgenerational thing in which we get it somehow out of the compartment. That may be a long time. How do we move from thinking of the person as an individual, to thinking of the person as a part of a family? On one hand, we think this is very simple, very easy. Everybody knows that each person is an individual. And each person is also part of a family. It’s a relatively easy new thing to think of it in this way. A person is an individual, and also a part of a family. But that is a abstract or philosophical way of thinking. And there’s a big difference between that and being an individual and being a part of a family. That is the major hurdle.

For some reason, it’s hard for us to move away from thinking of the family as a collection of individuals, toward thinking of the family, as a functional unit. Most of the thinking that we have about family today, thinks of the family as a collection of individual individuals.

Aging in the Individual vs. the Family

My basic thesis for today, is directed at aging. In general, we speak of aging in the individual, an individual is born, he proceeds through each of the life stages, from infancy to adolescence to young adulthood, to mating and reproduction. And finally, through the declining years and death, everyone knows this. They know all the variations that go with it. We knew about this, by the time we became thinking beings by the time, by the time we were getting out of infancy. Everybody can look at the world around them and know that there are young people grow up and they grow old and die. So we all knew that. We know the problems.

There are people who have to deny their progression through the various life stages, have to act younger and all these kinds of things. And people who have to terminate a life prematurely. We all know these things. Yet we know that denial creates problems for the future. Mental health professionals have been told about life stages, which we already knew.

Since our first lectures, we’ve all been to innumerable lectures in which the know-it-all lecturer describes these life stages in detail. It’s presented as if people didn’t already know that.

Now, how does one go about focusing on the family instead of the individual? How easy or how difficult is it for us to think of nodal life events as family events, rather than events in the life of an individual?

Life Events as Family Events

This is real difficult.

If you don’t believe it, try it. Try thinking of a birth or a marriage or a graduation or a death as a family event, instead of an event in the life of the individual. Each of that is an individual event. And each event is also a family event. Neither way of thinking excludes the other way. To be able to think, toward the family is a new ballgame. It’s automatic for the human to think, in an individual framework. And it requires discipline to think toward a family framework.

But for those who can do it, it adds a great news dimension for understanding human life? How far can we go and thinking of aging as a family issue?

The Aging Family

Can we think of an aging family? That’s a real interesting one to think of an aging family. What is the lifespan of a family? Until a couple of generations ago, promoted largely by Alexis Correll, there was the notion that cells live forever. In other words, the cell keeps on dividing and reproducing itself and it goes forever.

That is no longer considered a fact of life. One of the great Thursday evening sessions was about a year ago when I subject George Edworthy of Boston. And he had done this beautiful thing of starting off with a single fibroblast in a culture and setting up a movie camera to record this culture, on and on, and on and on through each reproduction as far as it could go. I’ve forgotten a number of times, you start off with this beautiful culture with one cell and that cell divides and its two and those divide an it’s four then 16. Very quickly, this culture is crowded with cells. They keep on dividing and building up, and then it reaches a point beyond which it can’t go.

And the cells begin dying and not reproducing. Until eventually I don’t know what it is seven days or I don’t know hours I believe it’s days. So the culture is a mass of debris from the dead set, and the culture is no more.

There are research studies to support that. Jack Calhoun and mice studies in that life does not perpetuate itself. Dave Musto was talking I was thinking about the Addams Family perpetuating itself. I believe that the family perpetuates itself by combining with other families, and that this is essential. Here in past sessions we’ve talked about families of extinction families that become extinct and this is all on a notion of what is the life of a family.

Reframing Aging as a Family Process

The more we can think about say the process of aging as a family issue. The more it helps remove it from the status, aging from the status of a pathology and puts it in the category of a normal biological process.

All of our basic psychological theory is based on the life history of the individuals from birth to death. How did we get that way? How did we get to thinking of that as the only model? Certainly, Freud popularized it. And from the standpoint of conventional psychological theory, depth theory, depth therapy means going back to the earliest infancy to uncover traumatic events that cast shadows into the future. So from that frame of reference, when we think of depth therapy, we’re thinking of the lifespan of an individual. And yet, that individual was preceded by in 500 years, something like 32,000 separate families in five years in five generations is 64 families. So in little over 100 years, we’re all the products that have 64 families of origin. So when you move to thinking in family terms, it’s different.