A sampling of TCTV.live

Michael White landed on a rather cheeky idea that the person was not the problem . . . the problem was the problem. Simple right? Hmmmm – not so fast. Two decades before his brief foray into maps, Michael’s workshops focused almost entirely on the politics and practice behind locating problems and persons within cultural, contextual and relational contexts.

In this 1987 lecture Michael White begins to clearly outline his steps away from ideas of structuralism and functionalism. Why is this move considered important? Primarily because the vast majority of psychological and family therapy practice is based in structuralism and functionalism.

Michael White’s workshop outlines three important relational assumptions involved with narrative therapy practice. This is as clear an explanation as you will find (:

In this 1991 workshop handout Michael White outlines the new practices associated with the externalizing of problems, how externalizing is considered a relational counter-practice, and how externalizing questions are relational and non-individualist in their purpose and intention.

During Therapeutic Conversations 14 David Epston discusses ideas on co-research and the politics of knowledge.

The paper brings together the relational politic of narrative theory and practice considerations when working with persons living on psychiatric wards who have been professionally named and captured within destabilizing chronic identities. The paper features an example of therapeutic letter writing campaigns.

Within this portion of the 1995 VSNT interview with David Epston & Michael White, Michael outlines how externalizing questions are purposefully designed to bring forth an ethic and politic of experience, and David Epston describes the problem with what he calls ‘juvenile externalizing’ questions

In the live video session Stephen Madigan demonstrates a few basic narrative therapy practices including relational externalizing, morality and counter-morality conversations, unique outcomes, counter-storying, and reauthoring imagined future possibilities.