The 47th Annual Symposium
on Family Theory and Family Psychotherapy will held November 5-6, 2010

Distinguished Guest Lecturer: Peter Stearns, PhD

Dr. Peter N. Stearns has accepted the Bowen Center’s invitation to be the Distinguished Lecturer for the 47th Annual Symposium on Family Theory and Family Psychotherapy.

Dr. Stearns is professor of history at George Mason University where he has also been provost since 2000. During his tenure as Chair of the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon he played a key role in the rise of social and cultural history and founded and edited the Journal of Social History.

In 2003 Dr. Stearns published Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America, in which he traces some significant changes in adult-child relationships, particularly in the last several decades. Beginning in the 1920s, many American parents, and those who advised them, began to believe that children were physically and emotionally vulnerable which led not only to how matters were handled within the family but how parents responded in relationship to larger social institutions. From a broad historical perspective, Dr. Stearns provides a better understanding of the evolution of parenting and provides a basis for thinking about appropriate reactions to pervasive worries in contemporary society.

Dr. Stearns made a very informative and engaging presentation on this topic at the Thursday Professional Lecture Series in 2005.

About the Symposium

This Symposium is the forty-seventh in a series begun in 1965. The Symposium is the most important annual meeting on Bowen theory and its applications because it brings together the liveliest minds in the Bowen network to present, question, and discuss the latest research and ideas. As always, the Symposium also features a Distinguished Guest Lecturer from another discipline whose research is relevant to Bowen theory. Bowen theory is not a fixed body of knowledge, but changes in response to new facts about human emotional functioning from many disciplines. Distinguished Guest Lecturers have been leading authorities in such diverse fields as sociobiology, ecology, primatology, evolution, neurobiology, genetics, and medicine. The knowledge of the Distinguished Guest Lecturer is very important to keeping Bowen theory an open system.