Michael E. Kerr – författare

Murray Bowen (1931–1990) was the first to study the family in a live-in setting and describe specific details about how families function as systems. Despite Bowen theory being based on research begun more than seventy years ago, the value of viewing human beings as profoundly emotionally-driven creatures and human families functioning as emotional units is more relevant than ever. This book, written by one of his closest collaborators, updates his still-radical theory with the latest approaches to understanding emotional development.Reduced to its most fundamental level, Bowen theory explains how people begin a relationship very close emotionally but become more distant over time. The ideas also help explain why good people do bad things, and bad people do good things, and how family life strengthens some members while weakening others. Gaining knowledge about previously unseen specifics of family interactions reveals a hidden life of families. The hidden life explains how the best of intentions can fail to produce the desired result, thus providing a blueprint for change. Part I of the book explains the core ideas in the theory. Part II describes the process of differentiation of self, which is the most important application of Bowen theory. People sometimes think of theories as "ivory tower" productions: interesting, but not necessarily practical. Differentiation of self is anything but; it has a well-tested real-world application. Part II includes four long case presentations of families in the public eye. They help illustrate how Bowen theory can help explain how families—three of which appear fairly normal and one which does not—unwittingly produce an offspring that chronically manifests some time of severely aberrant behavior. Finally, the book proposes a new "unidisease" concept—the idea that a wide range of diseases have a number of physiological processes in common. In an Epilogue, Kerr applies Bowen theory to his family to illustrate how changes in a family relationship system over time can better explain the clinical course of a chronic illness than the diagnosis itself. With close to four thousand hours of therapy conducted with about thirty-five hundred families over decades, Michael Kerr is an expert guide to the ins and outs of this most influential way of approaching clinical work with families.

Lebanon is the prisoner of its geography and its history, a prize for invaders since ancient times, a small multi-denominational state still recovering from a bloody civil war in its search for political autonomy and stability. This book examines the country's recent past since 2005, when a mass movement agitated against Syrian dominance in the wake of the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri. Also detailed are the role of Hezbollah and other political groups. The authors examine the changes that these events brought to Lebanon, be they lasting or ephemeral, and the challenges they represent for a state which, despite the resilience of its power-sharing system of government, remains hotly contested and unconsolidated. Sectarian tensions have escalated, predominantly between the Sunni and Shia communities, causing outbursts of street-based violence and paralysis in government. This two-bloc system has left Lebanon ungovernable, not simply due to deep-seated political differences, but because of the external linkages which ties the two blocs to their foreign patrons, namely the USA and Iran. As the Arab Spring develops, it also increases Hezbollah's significance to Iran as the embattled Assad regime struggles to quash the Syrian insurgency.