The Family Emotional System: An Integrative Concept for Theory, Science, and Practice by Robert J. Noone

The Family Emotional An Integrative Concept for Theory, Science, and Practice presents an ongoing dialogue among scientists, family investigators, and clinicians related to a natural systems view of the family and human behavior that has been occurring over several decades. The concept of the family as an emotional system, as defined in Bowen theory, is presented as the principal integrative concept underlying this dialogue and an effort to move toward a science of human behavior. As a natural system, the family forms the immediate and most important context for individual development, and may be the most central and important environment shaping brain development across the lifetime of the individual.

This book explains how the family system can serve as an integrative framework within which specific factual discoveries and hypotheses from many areas of science can be brought together and understood as various manifestations of a coherent whole.