Grandparent Deaths in an Intense Extended Family Symbiosis

Post Date February 26, 2019
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Category Bowen Family Systems Theory, Chronic Anxiety, Death & Chronic Illness, Differentiation of Self, Emotional Triangles, Family Emotional Process, Grief & Mourning, Jim Edd Jones

In the last two months or so, I have been studying symbiosis; e.g. parent-child symbiosis. Why? When I reviewed the quantitative research on families of schizophrenics, it was striking how symbiosis as a factor in development of schizophrenia has been neglected by all the quantitative researchers. It seemed odd when you consider how strongly Murray Bowen and other schizophrenia researchers of the 1950s had emphasized it. (Hill, Lidz, Mahler, Searles, Wynne, et al.).

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“Hillbilly Elegy” meets Bowen Theory

Post Date June 27, 2018
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Category Bowen Family Systems Theory, Differentiation of Self, Family Emotional Process, Jim Edd Jones

J.D. Vance, author of the memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, is, by any measure, functionally successful:  a marine who served in Iraq, graduate of Ohio State, graduate of Yale Law School, and an editor on the Yale Law Journal.  Yet, his nuclear family of origin and extended family are low in level of differentiation.  Not the lowest, but low.  Individually, he’s probably somewhat higher than the system as a whole.

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SES, ACE, and Differentiation

Post Date June 5, 2018
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Category Annual Conferences, Bowen Family Systems Theory, Differentiation of Self, Jim Edd Jones

Authored by Jim Edd Jones, Ph. D.

At the 2018 Midwest Symposium on Family Theory and Family Therapy in Willmette, Ilinois this past May, Peter Gianaros from the University of Pittsburgh cogently argued that SES (Socio-Economic Status determined with a composite measure) partially predicts (correlation approximately 0.30) adult serious physiological symptoms, indicators of risk for serious symptoms, and neurobiological indicators of chronic stress/anxiety.  Notice that the correlation is modest, with many exceptions to the correlation.

I would expect that level of differentiation of the individual and/or the …

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Patterns of Interaction in Living Systems

Post Date February 25, 2018
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Category Jim Edd Jones

Authored by James E. Jones, Ph.D.

For the last 40 years, The Marder Lab at Brandeis University, with principal investigator Eve Marder, Ph.D., Professor of Biology, has studied one small system of 5 neurons from the 30 neuron stomatogastric ganglion in the stomach of crustaceans.  This ganglion produces three rhythmic oscillations needed for operation of that stomach.  The lab has extensive information about the parameters of connection among these 5 neurons that drive the triphasic oscillations produced by the 5 neurons.  But Marder says that while …

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