Anti-individualist narrative practice: Listening to the echoes of cultural histories— Stephen Madigan

I wrote this keynote speech for Dulwich Centre’s July 2011, International Narrative Therapy and Community Work Conference in Salvador, Brazil. The purpose of the talk was to convey a critique on individualism and its plague on therapeutic thinking and practice. As a response to individualism, I offered up the communalising relational practice of therapeutic letter writing campaigns. The talk was also a place where I sought to publicly appreciate my longstanding apprenticeship with David Epston and Michael White. I then tied these narrative ideas together with my early growing up experiences inside an immigrant Irish family who worked tirelessly with the poor and dispossessed and who never once found cause to pathologise anyone.