Michael White. Biografia

There are some clues in the biographies of White and Epston. Michael White was born in 1948, into a white Australian working class family in Adelaide. His father was a returned soldier, his mother a housewife. On leaving school, Michael found his first employment in a draughtsman's office, later working as a landscape gardener and labourer. In his early twenties, he trained in Social Work and found employment at Royal Adelaide Children's Hospital as a clinical social worker. It was here that his already developed political awareness focussed upon the inequities within therapeutic practice as he experienced them in the hospital system. These inequities, both within the hierarchical practices of the hospital administration and within the ways in which clients were treated as objects of study, led him to begin to challenge practices of power. In the late 1970's he left the public system and entered into private practice with another social worker, establishing a precedent in the delivery of clinical therapy by other than psychologists and psychiatrists in Australia. He has continued in private practice to the present time, establishing training programmes for therapists and undertaking teaching on an ever-widening world stage. Michael and Cheryl White established Dulwich Centre, and created Dulwich Centre publications in the mid-1980s. Cheryl White plays a significant role in the development of Narrative Therapy, as the publisher of Dulwich Centre Journal, Gecko, and a growing list of books, as a full partner in the Centre, with responsibility for the training programme, and as Michael's life-partner and a strong influence upon his ideas and work. They have one child, now in early adulthood.

Michael White is the founder of Narrative Therapy, which has become one of the prevalent theories used in psychotherapy today. It has also been a source of techniques that have been adopted by other theoretical approaches. Dr. White is a practicing clinician and co-director of the Dulwich Centre in Adelaide, South Australia.[1]

He is a family therapist, author of several books of importance in the field of family therapy and Narrative Therapy. He is also known for his work with children. He states that he was most influenced by the theoretical works of Michel Foucault and of Gregory Bateson.

 

 

Phoenix