Narrative Therapy

Origins & Influences

Narrative Therapy was developed in the 1980s and 1990s by Michael White in Adelaide, Australia, and David Epston in Auckland, New Zealand. White was a social worker heavily influenced by Foucault's analysis of how institutional power produces the categories through which people understand themselves — including psychiatric diagnoses. Epston brought an anthropological sensibility and Gregory Bateson's ideas about how meaning is constituted through difference and context. The core move — 'externalizing the problem' ('The problem is the problem, the person is not the problem') — was White's clinical innovation, but its philosophical roots run through Foucault (power produces subjects), Derrida (meaning is deferred, never fixed), and Bruner (narrative as the primary mode of human meaning-making). Narrative Therapy is explicitly political in a way most therapies are not: it assumes that many personal problems are better understood as effects of dominant cultural narratives about gender, race, class, and normality. The therapist's job is not to diagnose or treat but to help people 're-author' their stories by identifying 'unique outcomes' — moments when they already acted outside the dominant narrative — and building alternative story lines from there.