who developed the idea of the family ecosystem or family systems theory.
Family Systems Theory. One of the first people who studied the impact of the family unit on abnormal psychology was Murray Bowen. Bowen grew up in a small town in Tennessee and seeing the families around him gave him the idea that each family works as a single unit. This is the basic idea behind the family systems theory developed by Bowen: That a family acts as a unit (or system) that influences the individual members of that family. Bowen believed that families should be studied as systems, not as loose, unrelated interactions between individuals.