Narrative Therapy

At the heart of social workers David Epston and Michael White’s creative practice known as narrative therapy is an unswerving commitment to a relational, contextual, and anti-individualist therapeutic view of people and relationships. Turning away from 150 years of psychological thought, narrative therapy is founded on an ideology designed to counter the decontextualized, skin bound, nonrelational, individual self. Instead of being informed by the discourses of psychology and psychiatry, narrative therapy is situated within the disciplines of cultural anthropology, feminism, postcolonialism, antioppression, social justice, literary theory, and queer studies (to name just a few of the disciplines).

The practice of narrative therapy is primarily concerned with questioning the politics of identity making and of who has the storytelling rights to the story being told in therapy. ...