Peter Titelman, Ph.D.
I am a clinical psychologist specializing in family systems therapy and training mental health practitioners. I help adult individuals and couples with relationship and life cycle issues, including leaving home, marriage, the arrival of children, separation, divorce, and remarriage, emotional cutoff in the family, as well as chronic illness and death in the family. In addition, I deal with clinical issues such as anxiety, depression, and substance abuse, as well as issues and conflicts within the nuclear family, the family of origin, and the extended family. I have been in private clinical practice in Northampton, MA, for forty years.
In graduate school at Duquesne University I studied existential phenomenological, and psychoanalytic theories and therapies. In 1971, while still in graduate school, I began postgraduate study of Murray Bowen’s family systems theory. I met him in Washington, DC, at the center now named the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family. In 1981 and 1984, as co-director of the Family Living Consultants of the Pioneer Valley I brought Bowen to Northampton, MA to present his theory. I knew Murray Bowen, MD until his death in 1990. Bowen theory and therapy opened my mind to seeing the family system as well as the individual. Bowen’s approach involves the relationships between the individual, the couple, the nuclear family, and the family of origin. The focus is to learn more about one’s self and one’s family in order to not be reactive or blaming toward family member(s). I believe that emotional problems do not lie within a single individual. The goal for the client(s) is to define his or her self, while also being able to relate to his or her family members.
I have edited the following books:
- The Therapist’s Own Family: Toward the Differentiation of Self, (Jason Aronson, 1987),
- Clinical Applications of Bowen Family Systems Theory, (Haworth, 1998),
- Emotional Cutoff: Bowen Family Systems Theory Perspectives (Haworth, 2003),
- Triangles: Bowen Family Systems Theory Perspectives (Haworth Press, 2008),
- Differentiation of Self: Bowen Family Theory Perspectives (Routledge/Taylor & Francis group, 2015),
- Death and Chronic Illness in the Family: Bowen Family Systems Theory, co-edited with Sydney Reed, MSW. (Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, to be available in the Fall of 2018)
