White, Michael

Michael White (1949–2008) was a psychotherapist and the founder of narrative therapy. At the heart of White’s practice of narrative therapy was an unswerving commitment to not individualize or locate the origins of problems inside the client’s body. This radical therapeutic departure from the central tenets of 150 years of psychological, psychiatric, and scientific understandings of mental health affords narrative therapy a unique position within psychology’s therapeutic landscape.

Much has been written about the “magic,” “difference,” and “mystique” of White’s practice of narrative therapy. What made his narrative therapy practice different from what had preceded him was his decision to embrace the enormous body of scholarship directed toward uncovering the ideological, political, and ethical biases underlying the authority for psychological knowledge and rewriting how problems originate ...