Undifferentiated Family Ego Mass–this is a short piece I submitted recently to an online encyclopedia on family theory and therapy and submitting it here for any feedback, would like to develop it further. I enjoyed thinking about this early term.
The undifferentiated family ego mass was an early term that Murray Bowen used to describe his observations of the human family that would later form the basis of Bowen Family Systems Theory, or Bowen theory. The main discovery of his research project at the National Institutes of Health from 1954 to 1959 was the emotional oneness in families, the undifferentiated family ego mass. In the study, entire families lived on a psychiatric hospital ward and data about them was recorded 24 hours a day. The families included a young adult child with schizophrenia and mother, and later the father and other siblings, as Bowen’s initial view of a symbiotic relationship between mother and child enlarged to seeing the whole family actively participating in an emotional oneness. While his observations contributed to understanding schizophrenia in the context of family projection processes, the major contribution of the research was the recognition that the family functions as an emotional, and even instinctive, unit, rather than just a collection of individuals. Bowen wrote that the conceptual shift was away from seeing schizophrenia as contained within the individual patient to seeing it as a manifestation of an active shifting emotional process of the family as a whole.
Bowen’s NIH research was with families who had a member with a major mental illness., and there was a question whether these families were different in emotional oneness from average families. But Bowen found the same emotional oneness and lack of differentiation of individual family members in his outpatient cases. In 1959, Bowen moved to Georgetown University and established the Georgetown Family Center. He saw that families of a broad range of emotional maturity functioned with an emotional oneness and presented a challenge for family members to define themselves as individuals. The important difference was in the intensity of the emotional process, and the greater the intensity, the greater the challenge in differentiating as an individual from the emotional oneness.
An example of the difference that the degree of intensity can make is in a parent’s emotional reaction to a sick child. An intense reaction might include a parent unable to sleep at night and doing more for the child than is needed, while in a less intense emotional oneness, a parent is able to care for the child while able to function in other areas, too. In the more intense family process, the parent may continue to be anxious about the child even after the child is well, whereas in a less intense family the parent can be at ease with the child’s growing independence. In another example, a parent is able to enjoy affection for the child, while at the same time being realistic about the child’s abilities as well as weaknesses. In a more intense version of the family emotional process, the parent may build the child up unrealistically, as a great beauty or a genius, or may emphasize a weakness in a child to such an extent as to be unable to acknowledge realistic accomplishments. It is possible for a parent genuinely to admire his or her child, while at the same time to restrain from acting on the admiration in a way that might prove to be harmful to the child in the long run.
In his earliest writings about the NIH research, Bowen identified a lack of ego boundaries as an essential issue and stressed the importance of differentiating from the family oneness. By naming the processes in the family as “undifferentiated,” he put attention on the differentiating process. From his first use of the term, he was contrasting the undifferentiated family ego mass with the effort to define an individual self within the emotional oneness of one’s family. Though Bowen later found other terms to describe the family oneness, the term remains a valuable link to the development of Bowen’s theory and therapy.
Bowen used the term undifferentiated family ego mass, including “ego,” in his early writings to try to communicate a new and different way of thinking to a field of psychiatry still dominated in the 1950s by Freudian theory. As he attempted to move his theory toward the accepted sciences, he abandoned the term. He began to refer to the family emotional oneness instead as the emotional system. He clarified that the family functions as an emotional, or instinctive, unit. He used the term “emotional” more as Darwin did, meaning instinctive.
In the years preceding the NIH research, in the late 1940s and early 1950s when Bowen worked as a psychoanalyst at the Menninger Foundation, he read widely in evolution and comparative anatomy and behavior. He began to view the human family as a natural system, with characteristics in common with other natural systems. Though working in Freudian theory initially, he began to move toward a new theory that would be consistent with what the human had in common with other life forms. He believed that would allow discoveries in the life sciences to contribute to a greater understanding of human beings, and vice versa. Indeed, Bowen’s concept of the emotional system can be applied to the reproductive and social groups of other social life forms, from bacteria to other primates and social mammals like dolphins. Bowen identified two counterbalancing forces, which he called togetherness and individuality, which can be seen in emotional systems across species. Bowen added that variation in the way people balance individuality and togetherness in the human family depends on the degree to which they are differentiated as individuals from the family emotional system.
See also Emotional System, Differentiation of Self, Multigenerational Transmission, Projection Process, and Nuclear Family Emotional Process.
Bowen, M. (1978). Family therapy in clinical practice. New York: Jason Aronson.
Laurie:
I am thinking that this is a piece that could be understood by people unfamiliar with Bowen theory. I am thinking that people may have an easier time hearing the concept of differentiation from the view of emotional oneness and the process of differentiating a self from that. I think the history of Bowen’s efforts in the development of his theory is so important as it helps to know the background before attempting to understand the concepts. This describes how the concept was defined and the evidence for it is found within the interactions of the family. I think your examples are also helpful in describing the variation in differentiation.
Laurie,
This is an important topic. I still use the term, or I sometimes day undifferentiated family emotional mass. The point is the lack of selfs and lack of boundaries, which leaves a system vulnerable to any passing breeze of anxiety.
Laurie,
I think you have put together the history of Bowen’s research, and the way the language evolved along with the theory. I recall different ways Bowen talked about fusion and the emotional system, using terms like “emotional stuck togetherness” and “agglutinated anxiety” at times. Finding the clearest and most accurate language was an ongoing effort. What you have written is indeed clear and accurate.
Laurie, I think this is nicely done. what aspects of family emotional ego mass are you wanting to further develop?
I’ve heard Andrea talk about the NIMH research and the way the psychotic symptoms resolved as the patients were treated to total acceptance and no expectations and they became babyish as proving that the problem was ego deficit and that the problem did not reside in the Id.