FEST Writing Group

Draft for FEST: Ideas for presentation at the 2020 Symposium, The human family as a product of evolution—Any ideas about this draft? Including how does the multigenerational emotional process fit with evolution?  Thank you for any feedback,

Laurie

 

Murray Bowen described in detail how a human family tends to compromise the functioning of one or more members, often on individual in particular.  The stress and impairment that this individual carries seems to benefit the stability of the family as a whole.

 

Certainly, as one individual absorbs more of the stress from the anxious or angry or idealized focus of the other family members, the other family members are somewhat relieved of their own stress.  Bowen added that the vulnerable one participates in the process as well.  It is phenomenon that occurs at the level of the group, with some more intensely involved in the process than others.  Usually the individual next in line to be exploited by the family is especially active in keeping the focus of stress going on the vulnerable one.

 

Lynn Margulis and I were especially taken with the heteryst-forming cyanobacteria as an example in an ancient organism of the same kind of process that Bowen identified in the human family.  One individual is used for the benefit of the group, impairing tis function as an individual, no longer able to feed itself or to reproduce but supplying the colony with needed nitrogen that it never gets to use itself.

 

Over the years before her untimely death, Margulis became interested in Bowen theory.  She wanted to be involved in a broad study of applying Bowen theory to all of the major forms of life.  She believed that the theory was important in describing the way a social or reproductive group exploits one or more individuals at the level of the group for the group’s benefit and at the expense of the individual or individuals.  In some life forms, the majority of the group are exploited.  She did not like the terms benefit and expense because they come out of financial rather than biological systems.

 

Lynn Margulis was the oldest of five sisters, and I met all of them, including the beautiful thin blonde who married a Nobel laureate and the solid and effective teacher with a good sense of humor.  There was one sister who clearly struggled with weight and other health issues as well as with relationships.   Margulis believed that levels of differentiation were also linked to reproductive success.  She herself had four children.

 

My question is to the esteemed David Sloan Wilson:  what does this process that occurs at the level of the group, perhaps in all social species, in which one or more are sacrificed for the good of the larger individual, the group?

 

Bowen believed that it was part of the evolutionary process.  Is it?  And if so, how?  Certainly it plays out in the human family as it plays out in other evolved species.  It is a major part of our evolutionary history, one that Bowen had the incredible boldness to suggest could be changed by knowledge of his theory.  In other words, Bowen saw that the unequal distribution of differentiation of self was based on a process that Nature devised.  He believed that my knowledge of the process we could do it differently than the way Nature came up with to do it.  He directed a way toward increasing differentiation that was not dependent on a process that impaired, and made, the undifferentiated.

 

I recall Bowen said that what he saw, the family functioning as a unit, was a discovery that “comes once in several lifetimes to the lucky.”

 

He believed that the multigenerational emotional process that leads some to be more differentiated, and others to be less, explained the great variation in human functioning.  He believed that the multigenerational emotional process was not a genetic form of inheritance, but a genetic-like form of inheritance.  It likely has to do with genetic expression.