Carl Whitaker

After his retirement Whitaker continued to teach and lecture widely, and he and his wife, Muriel Schram Whitaker, consulted with and supervised family therapists around the world. His last book, Midnight Musings of a Family Therapist, was published in 1988 by W. W. Norton.

A number of Whitaker's ideas about family therapy are presented in The Family Crucible, written with Dr. Augustus Napier in 1978, which became a highly influential work in the field. In 1982 Whitaker's major articles on family therapy were collected in From Psyche to System edited by John R. Neill and David Kniskern.

"Carl Whitaker was one of the founding generation of family therapists who broke the rules of the psychotherapeutic orthodoxies of the time, such as that therapy focused on a single client and was totally divorced from family life," said Richard Simon, editor of The Family Therapy Networker, a leading publication in the field. "His idea was that the entire family was the client." Dr. Whitaker, was known for his charm and charismatic manner, was one of the most powerful voices in shaping the practice of family therapy as it began to develop in the 1960s. Often provocative in his teaching, he told one interviewer, "Every marriage is a battle between two families struggling to reproduce themselves."

From 1946 Whitaker served as Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Emory University, where he focused on treating people with schizophrenia and their families. He became a professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1965 until his retirement in 1982. During his tenure at the University of Wisconsin University of Wisconsin–Madison, he refined and articulated his ideas about psychotherapy, which he coined symbolic-experiential family therapy, and his national influence on the emerging field grew stronger.

Whitaker was a native of Syracuse, NY, where he attended high school, university, and medical school. Whitaker received his M.D. from Syracuse University in 1936. After a residency in obstetrics and gynecology, Whitaker began to work in 1938 in a psychiatric hospital, and soon became fascinated by the challenge of treating people with schizophrenia. Observing that some patients seemed to recover only to have their problems re-emerge when they returned to their families, Whitaker began to focus on treating the whole family rather than the one patient.

Carl Alanson Whitaker (1912–1995) was an American physician and psychotherapy pioneer family therapist.