The 48th Annual Symposium
on Family Theory and Family Psychotherapy was held

November 4-5, 2011

Distinguished Guest Lecturer: Raghavendra Gadagkar, PhD

Dr. Raghavendra Gadagkar, PhD has accepted the Bowen Center’s invitation to be the Distinguished Lecturer for the 48th Annual Symposium on Family Theory and Family Psychotherapy.

Dr. Gadagkar is Professor, Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. The major focus of Dr. Gadagkar’s research is the origin and evolution of cooperation in animals, especially the social insects, such as ants, bees, and wasps.

The relevance of his work to our own species is captured in one of his recent articles:

Anthropologists can offer us a glimpse into the lives and mores of ‘primitive’ and ‘exotic’ human societies. Biologists can do much more; they can offer us insights from a whole range of animal societies with millions of years of evolutionary history. And those of us who study insect societies can hope to harness wisdom from an altogether different sub-kingdom of animal life. I certainly do not think we should imitate insect societies blindly, but I do think that they can hold a mirror to us and offer us a means to reflect on our own society and learn more about ourselves.

His research is creative and careful, and his enthusiasm for knowledge is absolutely infectious. An excellent way to prepare for his talk is to read Survival Strategies: Cooperation and Conflict in Animal Societies (Harvard University Press, 1997). Professor Gaddagkar’s homepage is: http://ces.iisc.ernet.in/hpg/ragh.

About the Symposium

This Symposium is the forty-eighth 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 history, 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.