ABSTRACT
Augustus (Gus) Y. Napier was born in Decatur, Georgia, in 1938 and graduated from Wesleyan University with a B.A. in English. After deciding to become a therapist through a personal therapy experience, he earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of North Carolina. During an internship in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he began to work with Dr Carl Whitaker as a student co-therapist. Dr Napier later served on the faculties of the Psychiatry Department and the Child and Family Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin. He was the former director of The Family Workshop, a family therapy training institute in Atlanta, Georgia, where he worked frequently with his wife, Margaret, who is also a family therapist. A frequent consultant, he is the author of seminal family therapy text The Family Crucible (1977) with Carl Whitaker and of The Fragile Bond (1988). He is also the co-editor of the Handbook of Family Development and Intervention (2000) with William C. Nichols, Mary Anne Pace-Nichols, and Dorothy Becvar. He currently lives in North Carolina with his wife, and has recently published on a book of poetry and photographs entitled Convergence . He agreed to participate in an interview in March, 2009, with Paul Peluso. The interview was transcribed and edited by John McIlveen
PRP: Thank you for agreeing to do this interview. AYN: With some misgivings, I should add. I have been retired from practice for more than 10 years — though I still give lectures from time to time. While I am not in close touch with practice issues, I am an avid amateur student of the aging process. Daily research with an “N” of two — Margaret and Gus. And of course friends, neighbors, and former colleagues are in our study.
