iplicity of agency in neuroses and emotions that it is difficult not to accept that depression can feed and be fed by family dynamics. For example, even if, in the nuclear-family context, one accepts Bowen's view of the "absence of differentiation of self" (Nichols & Schwartz, 2000, p. 118), or failure of reason over emotion, as the principal source of an individual's depression, one need not go far for Bowen's hypothesis of the "undifferentiated family ego mass" and see that there may be plenty of destructive emotion, and perhaps even depression, to go around in a family, thus making it difficult for one individual member to break the cycle of depression.
Indeed, as Bowen explains elsewhere (1978), failure of an individual to make (rational) choices in behavior or attitude that have the effect of allowing differentiation from this ego mass, or alternatively, the fusion of subject with the family mass, may foster pathology or indeed schizophrenia if the way in which the family functions as a whole is pathological or dysfunctional. The family system has a life and power of its own over the individual's emotional development and current state, and this power is not necessarily confined to the nuclear relationship but may be a feature of multiple generations and/or extended-family behavior.
To carry Bowen's views a little further in understanding the role of the family in an individual's depression, it seems rather crucial to state that the power of the family web may be exercised physically or psychically, socially or genetically. The individual member may respond to this power rationally or emotionally but in either case cannot avoid receiving familial cues. The person who engages in appropriate self-differentiation may break out of the circle of mass family pathology, may be obliged, it would seem in theory, to break away from a family in toto in order to assert self-differentiation.
But depression by its very nature would appe...