Family Therapy: Michael White's Narrative Theory

Michael White was an Adelaide, South Australia researcher, academic, and athlete who is known as the leading developer of narrative therapy. White attended South Australia University where he earned his degree in social work (Peterson, 2016). White started his own private practice at Dulwich Centre in his hometown Adelaide where he specialized in family therapy (Peterson, 2016). In the late 1970’s Michael White became fascinated by the work of Gregory Bateson, he began to develop ideas based off Bateson statement about “how people construe the world than in the behavioral patterns of systems- based models.” (Nichols, 2014) White worked on developing his “novel ideas” which addressed how problems affect people……… David Epston was the second influential leader of narrative therapy and is a family therapist from Auckland, New Zealand (Nichols, 2014). Through Epston’s interests in anthropology, he come across narrative theory and wanted to bring it into his family
The pair’s partnership was described as being optimistic, having passion for their ideas, boundless amounts of energy, devotion to assist the families whom they were working with. With narrative theory being brought into family therapy sessions the two explored the idea of determining if personal accounts and memories that remain from childhood experience effect the patient’s obstacles seen in their lives. (Peterson, 2016)
Narrative therapy focuses on strengths, empowerment, and collaboration, and challenges the idea of absolute truth and is also part of the post- modern era in social work theories (Peterson, 2016). Narrative therapy was a therapeutic theory based on the idea that people interact through narratives that go into making up their sense of who they are (Nichols, 2014). Founders of narrative therapy, David Epston and Michael White believe people bring issues to therapy and make sense of their problem by telling their own