TRIBUTES TO MICHAEL WHITE

Shona Russell, Rob Hall, Maggie Carey, Alan Jenkins

Tribute to Michael White by Shona Russell, Rob Hall, Maggie Carey, Alan Jenkins click here.

For Narrative Practices Adelaide Memorials click here.

Jane Speedy and Martin Payne

Michael White: By Jane Speedy and Martin Payne click here.

David Epston

Remembering Michael White by David Epston click here.

Alan Jenkins

Michael White: 1948-2008 by Alan Jenkins click here.

Rick Maisel

Tribute to Michael White by Rick Maisel click here.

The Journal of Systemic Therapies

Saying Hullo Again: Remembering Michael White by Jim Duvall, Laura Beres & Marie-Nathalie Beaudoin click here.

Jim Duvall, Laura Beres & Marie-Nathalie Beaudoin (2008) Saying Hullo Again: Remembering Michael White. Journal of Systemic Therapies, Vol 27, No. 2, p 1-19.

Tribute to Michael White
       by Shona Russell, Rob Hall, Maggie Carey, Alan Jenkins

(written for “The Australian Association of Social Workers”)

Michael White made significant contributions to people’s lives in many parts of the world. He was highly regarded and loved by people who consulted him and by therapists who learnt from him. Recently, local and international therapeutic communities were saddened to learn of the sudden death of Michael. This paper was put together by a group of colleagues to acknowledge the range of contributions Michael made and to consider ways these contributions will continue to encourage and inspire the lives and work of many. 

Michael has been described in many ways, a” kind”, “generous”, “compassionate” man, but we also know him as a great “innovator” in the field of family therapy.  His work represents clinical and theoretical innovations in the realm of family therapy and community work.  He led a dedicated life showing rigorous and meticulous attention to developing alternate conceptions of therapy and practice that provide a powerful antidote to the concerns, predicaments and struggles of life. Children and their families feeling overwhelmed by a “problem” would often leave Michael’s room excited and feeling they had the personal strength to “put the problem in its place”. New options for action were discovered. Michael was determined to explore options that led to a re-invigoration of purpose and enriched possibilities in the lives of all people who consulted him. He however felt privileged to have been consulted and regularly acknowledged the joy and inspiration he experienced in such exchanges.

Michael said that he had many homes and friends around the world but he began his life in Adelaide, South Australia and loved living in Adelaide.  There he studied social work and began working as a Probation and Welfare Officer in 1970. After many years working as a psychiatric social worker Michael moved into private practice in 1981. He had already begun innovating and teaching ideas such as externalisation. During the 19 70’s Michael had been active in the field of family therapy and later became well known for his exploration of the narrative metaphor in therapy. These explorations have occurred in collaboration with his close friend and colleague, David Epston of Auckland, New Zealand. Michael and Cheryl White established Dulwich Centre which grew to become an internationally renowned narrative therapy training institute, a counselling centre, and an organisation which is regularly engaged in community projects. The focus of Michael’s work was to provide counselling services to the community, training opportunities for workers, to establish a context for innovative community projects and to publish widely on the subject of narrative therapy.

A key contribution Michael made was through the generation of broad links between philosophers, historians of thought, cultural anthropologists and the field of therapy, counselling and community practice. Michael readily shared the fascination he had for social inquiry with others and he became energized around possibilities for new action generated through his study of key thinkers in the field of social and human inquiry.  He developed ways of putting ideas into practice which opened new possibilities within the therapy field and for which he received national and international acclaim. However, Michael had no time for accolades or glorification but an enormous capacity to share his understandings and energy with unshakeable conviction in the agency of others to find and use the skills and knowledge's imbedded in their history.

Included in the range of Michael’s work has been the provision of workshops in counselling and community work for professional audiences in North America, South and Central America, Europe, Scandinavia, Asia, and Africa. Michael regularly held intensive training courses in narrative therapy locally and internationally. He was admired and respected as a teacher who provided unanticipated journeys for the audience as he shared stories, transcripts and maps to support practitioners in their explorations of narrative therapy. Practitioners who joined Michael in these training contexts frequently expressed a sense of exhilaration through his teaching. This related to the breadth of ideas and practices Michael explored which led to new options in therapeutic practice but also the resonance many practitioners experienced in relation to the hopes they held for their work and for the lives of people consulting them.

Michael served on the editorial advisory boards of several journals, including Family Process. He has been a long standing member of the Australian Association of Social Workers and the American Family Therapy Academy.

Alongside his therapeutic work and teaching work Michael is highly regarded for the role he has taken in community assignments where he has led teams of counsellors in responding to groups and communities who had been through significant trauma. A key example of this was the leadership role Michael took in 1994 with Reclaiming Our Stories, Reclaiming Our Lives, an initiative of the Aboriginal Health Council of South Australia and Dulwich Centre to implement one of the recommendations made by the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

Michael published widely on the subject of narrative therapy and went to some lengths to discuss the post -structuralist thought that provided a guide to his work. In 2007 “ Maps of Narrative Practice” Michael describes the therapeutic ideas and practices he developed over decades and the examples, transcripts and maps provide a stimulating and accessible overview of therapeutic inquiry informed by the narrative approach.

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Remembering Michael White
      by David Epston

Michael was a very humble and unassuming person...I am quite sure wherever he is now watching over these proceedings he would be very discomfited by the outpourings of shock, grief and mourning over his death on the one hand and the reverence in which he has been held and tributes paid to him from Quito in Ecuador   to Seoul in South Korea, from Moscow in Russia to Cape town in the Republic of South Africa. Michael's worst fear was of hagiographies.....I remember when he told me how worried about this he was, I had to go and look up the word. It is the literary genre to do with the lives of the saints I learned.  In fact, I suspect that out of respect for Michael, many of us deferred to his wishes for anonymity and only spoke of such matters in private or at least far away from Michael's hearing.  I know I certainly was one of those but I expect there were many like me.  He cringed in the face of what became a version of celebrity in the world of psychotherapy in which he came to be regarded as one of the most significant influences on his generation. I guesstimate the books he either co-authored or authored have sold well over 100,000 copies in 11 languages and once again I guesstimate well over 30 separate translations.

 Now that Michael is not here to censure us, I wanted to speak in the merest outlines of his life's work and do so by way of celebration and honour.  no one I know was readier to honour others than and made 'honoring' a catchphrase...let me give you one of a thousand possible stories from our friendship....Michael was an extraordinary cyclist....his fierce determination was matched by his physical capabilities....after all, in his early 50s, Michael came out of the water in his first full triathlon first  here swimming against semi-professional 20 year olds-

We would cycle up from sea level in Adelaide to the summit of Mt lofty-  o to 750 metres taking over an hour and a half. Not surprisingly, I would finish some time after him and I mean some time . He would always be waiting for me thrilled to see me as if I come in first.  "Eppy" he would say, "You rode so well...slow and steady...I have just got to learn to ride like you do...”  A stranger may have found such comments  feigned or even preposterous but if you knew Michael well, you knew that he really meant it.  He really wanted to learn to ride like I did, even if it in other ways, it would have handicapped him considerably in any time trial.  So tonight, I am going to speak without reference to Michael's restraints on how he wished to stand to one side of his ingenuity and at times his wizardry. I remember too that when some colleagues and I at John F Kennedy University near Berkeley, California, where Michael and I both taught in the early to mid-90s decided that his 'body of published work' merited a  doctorate and we, without informing him, proceeded to submit an application on his behalf.   He did receive a D.Litt or Doctor of Human Letters in 1996.  I was there that day and Michael, always expressing thanks to us, went through that day as if he had a sharp pebble in one or both of his sandals.  To this day, I still am in two minds if we had done the right thing.  Michael was too kind to say anything to the contrary, given that we were acting on our good intentions.

But to my way of thinking, Michael was an amateur philosopher. I don't mean amateur in the sense of amateur as a poor version of a professional but rather the older dictionary  meaning of amateur- one who cultivates a thing as a pastime....It was always extraordinary how such an 'amateur' led the world of psychotherapy, etc into what John Mcleod calls the post psychological, which he referred to "a greater or lesser degree they define therapy as primarily a social process than a psychological one...that we are seeing a historical and cultural shift in relation to the meaning and practice of therapy"...

 I was taken by Michael's sheer delight with those ideas that unsettled or troubled the taken for granted and allowed for ways to live and think otherwise than had been previously  permissible or even conceivable given that such ideas  had gained the status of a 'truth' .  First, he read the iconoclast Gregory Bateson, but tired after a few years of translating that into his practice/thinking and found Michel Foucault whose range of thought was vast beyond belief...who seemed able to turn just about everything upside down and if not upside down, at least to tilt that which had previously seemed so solid on to a precarious 90 degree angle.

 Michael caught the wave of postmoderism earlier than anyone else in the world of psychotherapy and the skillful surfer he was, he sailed to unknown seas on it, taking many of us along with him such was the sheer pleasure he took in 'deconstructing' the world around him.  In other ways, his mind was like a posthole digger....his readings and re-readings of the middle Foucault , and each reading  Michael seemed to savour more,  were penetrating...always going deeper at the same time of the effects of his readings radiating out into his practice/teaching. .  What limited him was the time available for such a pursuit.  This amateur cultivated his pastime late at night or on air planes between teaching assignments around the world.  I often wondered if Michael had far more time to cultivate such a pastime what that would have meant to narrative therapy.

 But for me, who was a fellow traveller, it was remarkable to watch say what Michael did over a decade with Myerhoff's paper which I first gave him a copy of  in 1983; or the book chapter of Foucault's power and knowledge  which I Xeroxed off for him in 1985.  To meet him later on for discussions or to teach together, it was fascinating to witness the inexorable expansion of these ideas over that vast divide of abstract theory to practice.

I have always considered Michael to merge in himself the rare combination of practitionership and scholarship but always ensuring that his practice came ahead of his scholarship.  I do not consider that theory made Michael but rather Michael's own clinical ingenuity exploited theory- they were merely tools for his to think further than his inventions had led him so far.....There was always this backwards and forwards between his practice and his tools to think with.

This radiated throughout his most recent and last book-maps of narrative practice in which he took it upon himself to commentate on his own life as a practitioner-scholar.  His clear intention was one that reflected his own modesty.  That is to make his practice and the ideas that inform them as easily accessible as possible for us to appraise and if we seek to do so, to apprentice ourselves to. In his humility, he often left out the genius and at times wizardry all those who had the opportunity to sit in on more than a few meetings  or watched his videotapes have witnessed.  Have you ever watched a video-tape  of Michael's, mesmerized, like I have, and all of sudden realized that the conversation had passed over some sort of bridge between despair and renewed hope and you wondered if you had lost consciousness for a split second because you didn't notice that happening I?  Has the coin of the explicit heads been turned over to reveal the implicit tails so quickly that, like me, you swear it was some sort of magic?

Michael in every workshop he ever taught and every book he wrote did his darndest to bequeath to us- his readers/students/workshop attendees- his practice/scholarship.  He was generous to a fault.  he tried to give away everything he had to each and every one of us who was willing to watch, listen or read.  That was what made his last book- maps of narrative practice - so significant to me. he used his  'maps' to reveal which way  he was going and why he might head in that direction, at the same time warning us that there are so many directions he may very well have headed in.  Or that you might head in.

Michael possessed a remarkable but gracious ease by which he could move between the large ideas of scholarship and the intimate and particular ideas of practice.  Having known Michael for 27 years, I think few in our field can go from what seems to be one extreme to another without a lot of border stops in between.  At each border stop, many others i know of get heavily taxed passing through each stop.  By the time, say the scholar reaches his/her practice they seemingly have been so depleted, it is often hard to see much connection between the two.  At times, the theory seems like sheer window-dressing. Michael, with only a few speed bumps to slow him down, travelled from one domain to the other seemingly unimpeded. I have always found this breathtaking and a testament to the conjunction of a remarkable spirit merging with an equally remarkable scholarship. In his last book, Maps of Narrative Practice, they were so woven together as to appear seamless. That is far from easy to achieve.

Either reading one of his transcripts or watching a videotaped/ meeting, Michael considered to be an ethical responsibility to continually make available...to expose his practice or the ideas that informed it to the widest critique. I want you to imagine how hard this must have been for such a modest person.  But Michael lived by a quote of Foucault's: We know what we do, we think we know what we think, but do we know what what we do does '.  Michael authorized his clients and the communities that petitioned him to have the first judgment; his professional colleagues came second.  Still, he was willing to allow us to go to the very heart of his practice and judge for ourselves.  you could almost palpably feel the relish with which Michael met the people who consulted him.  And how they in turn savoured those meetings.  It brought it home to me how enriching this work we do is to our lives- the 'two way street' that Michael unashamedly spoke to so often about.   Michael always assumed that we were the lucky ones and I know he certainly considered himself to have always been the lucky one in such meetings. ..I think Michael looked up to those he met.

Let me read you a quote from the philosopher Phillip Caputo in a book chapter about Michel Foucault in which he guesses what kind of therapist Foucault might have been, given that he had no explicit therapeutic intentions whatsoever throughout his philosophical career....But remember his first degree was in psychology and he did an internship in a public psychiatric institution in the 1950s.in France.

He writes:  Such a therapy if Foucault invented one that is 'does not look at the mad as patients in the sense of objects of medical knowledge but as patiens, as ones who suffer greatly who suffer from their knowledge.  Such a patient would not be an object of knowledge but an author or subject of knowledge, one from whom we have something to learn....he went on to surmise that for Foucault as a therapist 'the healing gesture meant to heal this  suffering is not intended to explain it away or fill in the abyss but simply to affirm that they re not  alone, that  our common madness  is a matter of degree, that we re all siblings in the 'same night of truth.  The healing gesture is not to explain madness if that means to explain it away but to recognize it as a common fate, to affirm our community and solidarity.

Compare this to my abstract of a quote from  Michael  in 1993 was so telling about why he did what he has done...

”And what of solidarity?  I am thinking of a solidarity that is constructed by therapists who refuse to draw a sharp distinction between their lives and the lives of others, who refuse to marginalize those persons who seek help, by therapists who are constantly confronting the fact that if faced with the circumstances such that provide the context of troubles of others, they just might not be doing nearly as well themselves.”

In 1981, I was asked to introduce Michael and his colleagues at a workshop on their work with people having psychotic experiences at the 2nd Australian family therapy conference in his home town of Adelaide.  I recall sitting there stunned throughout...after all, i had spent two years of a master’s degree reading everything written at the time about family therapy several years before. Luckily for me, there wasn't that much to read in those days. I recall it dawning upon me that I was witnessing the 'launching' of a new school of family therapy. I don't quite know what possessed me but I insisted on standing up afterwards and formally announcing what seemed to me to be an ineluctable conclusion.  That a new school of family therapy had been 'born' and we had all witnessed that.

 In 1983, after teaching together at the 4th conference, Michael, Cheryl and I had dinner together afterwards...I don't know how the conversation came up but Michael and I decided to become 'brothers'.....This was pre-aids so one of them suggested blood brotherhood...i had to beg off because I faint at the sight of anyone's blood, especially my own...but we decided to make our ideas and practice common property and vowed that we would never become rivals.  We did what we said we would do all these years up until he died.  in fact, we had made another vow late last year, one we can no longer keep...that we would meet a fortnight ago in Adelaide to sit down and plan our next project and book which undoubtedly would have kept us joyfully busy well in to our respective dotages...I will always remember Michael as my brother and a remarkable man.

With that in mind, I want to remind you of the luckiest breaks in the history of narrative therapy...In the late 1970s, Michael published a paper in the prestigious journal Family Process reporting on his work with the problem of anorexia at the children's hospital in Adelaide where he worked.  The advisory editor informed me some years ago that it was the very paper ever published showing positive results with the problem of anorexia.

Soon after that, the deputy director forbade Michael from meeting with families in which there was a young person diagnosed with anorexia because he was a social worker and was unfit for the task which should be restricted to more august medical and psychiatric practitioners.  Michael refused to adhere to this edict and continued to meet with these families and they with him...the next step the deputy director took was to remove all the chairs from Michael's room.  Michael and the families merely continued, now sitting on the floor...

Then the deputy director imposed on Michael what I gather he assumed would drive him into some other form of employment rather smartly...that from then on, he would be allowed only to meet with young people who had failed 2 year long psychoanalytic treatments for the problem of encopresis or in common parlance, soiling...this was truly dirty work.  Little did the deputy director know he had challenged Michael in the same way Foucault must have been challenged by what he had witnessed in a public psychiatric institution.  Here Michael would be required to turn the tables on conventional psychiatric wisdom and in doing so invent externalizing conversations and in turn narrative therapy.  

I know Michael once told me he had a 99% success rate in an average of 4 meetings, so much so that he felt obliged, perhaps with his tongue in his literary cheek, to submit these results as having to do with pseudo-encopresis because if it was true encopresis, such claims to these results would have had to have been the ravings of a lunatic.  ..Michael turned the problem of soiling into the object of everyone's scrutiny and called into question the very cultural construction of a problem, something so taken for granted that at first this was met with disbelief in some quarters, great relief in others.  Michael allowed his work and their outcomes to form the critique of that which he so opposed.....the turning of people into problems and by doing so, to degrade them, to look down on them and finally to dismiss them....

In his work at Glenside, a state psychiatric hospital where he worked for many years part-time, his team weighed the files of the candidates for their service...If the weighed 2 kilos or more, they welcomed them to their service...He would always add, “But we would never read them.”

....I believe what Michael most objected to and why he felt such a kinship with Foucault  was the prevailing professional ways of seeing those who s ought their help.. the gaze.  The feminist scholar, Marilyn Frye,  refers to this as the 'arrogant eye', a gaze that takes the professional's own standpoint as central, their, opinions, desires and projects as the salient ones, their experience and understanding as what is the case.  The arrogant eye, she writes allows them to absorb the identities of others into their own.  From the point of view of the arrogant eye, in so far as patients exist they exist for the professional.  They are dismissed and degraded in the light of such an eye.  Frye asserts that the loving eye knows the independence of the other. It is an eye of one who knows that to see the seen, one must consult something other than one's own will and interests....Under the loving eye, people who lay claim to certain kinds of knowledges aren't unauthorized or de-legitimated because they are not regarded to be in a position to know.  The loving eye confers social standing on those who have been dismissed and degraded by the arrogant eye.  i have no doubt that Michael looked upon  everyone with what Frye, referred to as- a loving eye....To fall under Michael's loving gaze you felt the utmost in respectworthiness, which was in absolute contrast to the blameworthiness of so many of the psychological and psychiatric . gazes....

Michael had an inimitable voice and quaint vocabulary that bent the English language at times almost to its breaking point.. He could be said to have willingly misused language to create new language.  There are so many of his linguistic inventions that haven't made the oxford English dictionary yet but they will. My favourite is 'knowledged.'  I am sure we have all adopted some of these White-isms perhaps even without knowing it to refresh our own thinking.  It is through his poetic vocabularies that you most easily appreciate both the novelty and subtlety of his though and his intention to turn language inside out...to expose how under-politicized language is...

Michael's loving eye had a tongue that constantly misused language without which according to the philosopher Feyerabend, “There can be no discovery.” Michael certainly had more than his fair share of discoveries....at times, the eccentric ways he put this thoughts into words seemed so incandescent compared to how opaque many of his sources were.  He illuminated ideas and the light that was reflected back allowed many of us to go where we might otherwise have found it hard going.  To see how Michael's mind, which was as unrelenting as rust, worked, I know I would watch for the slight shifts in his vocabulary which told me what I was seeking.  Michael would often say to me- “Why are you here?  You know all this?  You have heard it before!”  I would reply: "Every time you say it differently and that is what I m interesting in hearing."  But more in general, Michael illuminated and cleared a swath in the 'fields' of social work, psychology, psychiatry, etc. for many of us to ply our avocations.  If I have been told by hundreds that 'if it wasn't for narrative therapy, I would have had to leave my profession for other kind of work', Michael must have heard this so many more times than I did.

Michael was inspirational in this regard, but never appealing too sentimental, sermonizing on the one hand or the polemical on the other.  He inspired by his practice which was an alternative to that which he was critiquing and, as such, his critiques were always unassuming in their manner.    They  were never empty or uninformed.  He demanded of himself that he should offer clear, clear plans of what is to be done and how to do it.

There is so much to say about and thank Michael for and this is a feeble attempt.....

 I was teaching in Bogota, Colombia when I received the news that Michael had perished.  I persisted with this dedicating the teaching as a tribute to Michael.  On my last of the 4 days, Mariana Selas, waiting until everyone else had left, approached me and told me how desperately sad she was about Michael's death and began to sob inconsolably....asking what could she do on his behalf?  I asked her, “Did you meet Michael when he taught here in Bogota 6 years ago?”  ”No,” she replied...”Have you read his books”?  “No”, she replied....I was running out of options here but went on to ask, “Did you or are you studying him in your training”?  “No,” she replied...”How did you know him?” I finally asked. She replied, “Through your stories about him.”...I had never thought of that as I had never considered I would be telling stories about Michael.  But now I am and so can you.  This assist all of us to keep Michael well and truly alive in our lives and in our work in the same way he was so alive in his life and his work

I wanted to end this by a song.  This song was written and sung by Margarita Boom from Mexico.  She did so at my request when narrative therapy was invited  by the Cuban psychiatric association and Cuban social work association to introduce narrative therapy to Cuba. We refused to comply unless they would in turn introduce us to what they chose to refer to as 'Cuban social programs'.  This conference, sponsored by the World Psychiatric Association and the International Federation of Social Work, entitled 'The spirit of community: Narrative therapy and Cuban social programs' was held in early January, 2007.  Margarita's song speaks to how we hoped to meet them and embodies for me the 'spirit' of narrative therapy- that 'loving eye' I referred to by which Michael looked to those he met through the course of his work and his life.

Hermano del sol y tiempo

Deja que estreche tu historia
y se llenen mis manos
de nuevos sentidos,
que nunca habia visto,
quenunca habin sido,
que no habri podido
entender sin tu trino,
que tienen tu nombre
que traza un camino.

Deja ue lleve conmigo
un pedazo de tiemp
compartido
y el sabor a tibieza
que deja el amigo.

Hermno de sol y tiempo
qhe imp[orta el color del viento!
Nos une un sabor a sueno.

A mano con mano
Ir sosteniendo
un pedazo,
un cachito de mundo donde se pemita
andar a tu paso,
sentir lo que sientes,
y aunque diferente,
cantar con tu canto.

Dej que tome tu conciencia
y me lleve de vuelta
la certeza
que siendo distintos,
somos parecidos

Que el corazon late
los mismos latidos,
pero que tu forma
nventa
otro  ritmo

Deja que aprenda tu musica
y enriquezca mi mundo
con tu  mirada
y tenga en tu alma
una nueva morada.

Hermano el so y tiempo
que importa el color del viento!
Nos une un sabor a sueno

Brother of the Sun  and of  Time

Let me hold your story
and fill my hands
with new sensations
that I've never seen before
which have never existed
which I couldn't have understood
without your song
They bear your name
and trace out a road.

Let me take with me
a piece of our
time together
and savour the warmth
a friend leaves behind.

Brother of the sun and of time
who cares what colour the wind is?
We are joined by the taste of a
dream

Of being hand in hand
holding
a small piece,
a bit of a world
where you are allowed
to walk at your own pace
to feel what you feel
and, although different,
to sing your own song.

Let me take your conscience
and leave taking with me
the certainty
that although we are different
we're alike

That the  heart  beats
to the same beat
but your form
creates a new rhythm

Let me learn your music
and enrich my world
with the look of your eyes
and to find in your soul
a new home.

Brother of the sun and of time
who cares what colour the wind is?
We are joined by the taste of a
dream.

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Michael White : 1948-2008
by Alan Jenkins

Michael was one of Australia’s early innovators in Family Therapy and the foundation editor of this journal. With David Epston he founded and developed the theories and practices of Narrative Therapy. He walked alongside and inspired countless people all over the world. However, his influence and significance could never be epitomized or reduced in a list of his accomplishments and achievements. He held little respect for catalogues of status and acclaim.

Michael’s humanity and ethical commitment moved him to embrace life projects with vigour, enthusiasm and a sense of wonder and delight. The personal and political were deeply connected in projects from his early involvement with government agencies, his long and productive investment at Dulwich Centre to his exciting visions and developments with Adelaide Narrative Therapy Centre. He had no time for accolades or glorification but an enormous capacity to share his understandings and energy with an unshakable conviction in the agency of others to find and use their own wisdom. He trusted in the knowledge held by individuals and their potential for actualisation when shared in community. Michael’s inclusive practices sit alongside an abiding respect for resistance and protest and his influence has especially found place with communities throughout the world who have experienced disadvantage, particularly indigenous communities.

In a life characterised by curiosity and wonder, Michael embodied a sense of giving and care which was not possessive or imbued with a sense of ownership but which strove to reach out towards others; to seek and appreciate difference – a generous love. This love was evident in his words and his actions, whether teaching a concept which excited him, engaging with those who consulted him, riding his bicycle or relating a joyous event with his daughter, Penni.

In the ordinary aspects of everyday life, Michael found wonder and delight. What appeared ordinary seemed to transform itself into something quite extraordinary. This was not produced by the application of powerful strategies and expert technique but by studied reflection on practices of power, an ethical conviction in social justice and a common humanity. In working so hard himself to grapple with a wide range of esoteric concepts, how to name them and their political implications, Michael has helped many of us to access and develop practices which strive to be ethical, just and, to hold integrity.

Michael’s death was untimely. However, he was never one to stop exploring and developing in all aspects of his life. He was reaching towards exciting new places in his thinking and being. I believe that his death would have been untimely whenever it transpired.
Michael’s work from a life imbued with generosity, humanity and a keen intellect with a subtle but wicked sense of humour, will continue to nourish, sustain and generate new possibilities.

For Michael

Becoming present

A generous presence

finding wonder and sweet delight

in the ordinary passage of being,

so the banal comes to marvel its own existence

becoming extra-ordinary.

A bright light burning as it fades

Fading as it burns more brightly

in eternal return.

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Tribute to Michael White
     by Rick Maisel

When I first encountered Michael at a conference in Northern California in 1988, I was 31 years old. At that time I was mostly working from Milan Systemic Therapy and Developmental Object Relations models.  I was reasonably satisfied with the results I was getting in my work, and felt intellectually challenged and engaged.  I was not searching for a new orientation.  But sometimes you don't know what you are missing until you find it, and it is only then that you realize you were longing for it all along. Encountering Michael was like finding my professional soul mate. In Yiddish there is a word “Besheret” which means, “intended.” As in “meant to be”.   Michel White and Narrative Therapy was my besheret and I am going to tell a little bit of my falling in love story.

During this workshop back in 1988, Michael showed us a videotape of a meeting with a boy struggling some problem, though I can no longer remember what the problem was.  What I never forgot, however, was Michael's response to an instance of the young boy's triumph over the problem: He appeared to be so “struck” by the significance of the boy's achievement that he flew off his chair and landed on floor, eliciting peels of delighted laughter from the boy and his parents.  In this theatrical gesture of Michael's, I knew I was witnessing a therapist positioning himself in a way that was totally unique. I had never before seen a therapist operating out of such a profound sense of solidarity and respect, nor had I witnessed someone so playful and joyful in his or her practice.  On his face was that look that became so familiar to me over the years, one of rapt attention, a sparkle in his eyes, and his easy laugh that was always ready to erupt. 

It was evident to me that Michael had an unusual combination of intelligence and innocence-innocence not in the sense of naiveté, but more like a simple good-heartedness, which I think he may have absorbed from Rupert, the stuffed bear Michael kept in his office and loaned to traumatized children to be cared for. Perhaps that is why, when I picture Michael in my mind's eye, he always has big furry ears.

Determined to model my practice after Michael's, it was a bit disconcerting to realize in short order that the obstacles I was encountering were the very things I had spent the previous 7 years learning- namely theoretical notions about the self and psychopathology, the getting comfortable with my own expertise and insight as a psychologist, becoming skilled at dispensing this insight through interpretations, reframes, confrontations, paradoxical prescriptions, and plain old advice. It appeared as if I was going to have to set aside much of what I had so assiduously studied to become, in a certain sense, stupid.  I needed to learn to empty my mind of all the associations and conclusion that would pop into my head, and which had previously held such interest for me, and instead, attend much more closely to the meaning my clients were making of their own experience.  I remember Michael talking about his own proscription for himself when his mind began to spin out clever hypotheses: take two aspirin and go to bed. 

One of things that made Narrative Therapy such an ideal fit for me was the way in which it addressed itself to the issue of power in so many different arenas. This was initially most evident in the way Michael attended to the dynamics of power in the therapy itself.  Having rejected the notion that therapists were, by virtue of their so-called expert knowledge, in a better position to know what was really going on for their clients then were the client's themselves, Michael privileged the client's own accounts of their experience and believed that clients' knowledge was for more trustworthy than professional knowledge.   In doing so, Michael provided for himself, and for and for all of us, the most fundamental roadmap to guide us, that of the client's experience of the actual effects of our meetings with them. There was a kind of accountability to this work that I had never seen before. And this accountability provided me and my clients with a kind of safety net as I began to take up this work and experiment with an alternative practice. In addition, once problems were externalized and separated out from the identity of the client, it became possible to engage the client in “co-research, a term coined by David Epston, whereby client's first-hand experience of the problem could be utilized. While sadly, none of us will ever get to attend another workshop with Michael, will can still learn from Michael's teachers, who were first and foremost, the clients themselves. In that sense Michael truly gave us all a gift that keeps on giving.

It was Michael's taking up of Foucault's ideas about Modern or Disciplinary power that, to my way of thinking, really gave Narrative Therapy its radical and subversive edge. Michael always viewed therapy as a site of resistance to these dominant cultural specifications, and was keen to see that his work did not mindlessly reproduce these expectations and norms in our work with clients.  Rather, he gave us the means by which to honor, dignify and draw inspiration from those who choose to live outside of the mainstream expectations or find these expectations or norms impossible to live up to. 

Michael was not afraid to take on the issue of what Foucault called sovereign or traditional power in his work with families and couples.  By this kind of power I am referring to the use of coercion, manipulation or force to constrain, exploit, or otherwise subjugate another person. The earliest example of Michael addressing this kind of power that I recall witnessing was at a conference in Calgary in January of 1990 hosted by Karl Tomm. Michael consented to doing a live interview with a couple Karl had been seeing for over a year.  Four years prior to their commencing therapy, the woman had unilaterally decided to cut her long hair off against her husband's wishes and he had still not gotten over it. The woman recounted to Michael the choice she had made 5 years ago to cut her hair short without first obtaining the consent of her husband whim she knew would oppose it, and she described his subsequent and ongoing attempts to punish this defiance of his authority. I remember my breath catching in my chest when Michael initiated a line of enquiry with the question, “How did you come to the conclusion that your hair was actually YOUR hair?” I moved to the edge of my seat, fearing for Michael's safety.  Fortunately no physical confrontation ensued, but the husband did accuse Michael of taking his wife's side and then tried to shift the conversation onto his wife's alleged shortcomings. But Michael held his ground, saying that he was not taking sides but rather taking up the question of who her body belonged to her, as there appeared to be some disagreement about this.

I thought things might a get a bit ugly with the husband, but they never did.  Only once did I ever see Michael really butt heads with someone, and on this occasion the head-butting was literal and took place in the pool at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley after one of Michael's workshops.  I had been swimming for about 10 minutes when I was distracted by the voice of an obviously rattled elderly woman coming from the next lane over.  I stood up mid-lap and looked over and there was Michael being dressed down by a small woman for what she perceived as Michael's recklessness. She continued to lambaste Michael for his apparent carelessness and disregard for the well-being of others, and she did so with astonishing vigor as volume.  Even without the aide of my glasses I could discern an aghast and helpless look on Michael's face. I must confess to a small perverse pleasure in seeing him addressed in this manner, as I had only seen Michael addressed with a deferential respect bordering on reverence.  I was curious to see how Michael would respond to this verbal onslaught.  

I'm sure it will come as no surprise to anyone here that Michael matched the intensity of her outrage with equally intense and utterly sincere expression of remorse and concern for her well-being.  He repeatedly asked if there was anything he could do for her, reluctant to accept her assurances that she was fine. Before too long she was pleading with him to stop apologizing, and I am sure if not for the setting, they would have soon been sharing photos of children and grandchildren.

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