Paul Watzlawick

Paul Watzlawick (July 25, 1921 – March 31, 2007) was an Austrian-American family therapist, psychologist, communication theorist, and philosopher.

A theoretician in communication theory and radical constructivism, he commented in the fields of family therapy and general psychotherapy.

Watzlawick believed that people create their own suffering in the very act of trying to fix their emotional problems.

He was one of the most influential figures at the Mental Research Institute and lived and worked in Palo Alto, California.

Paul Watzlawick was born in Villach, Austria in 1921, the son of a bank director.

After he graduated from high school in 1939, Watzlawick studied philosophy and philology at the Università Ca' Foscari Venice even though the Faculty of Philosophy was not established before 1969, and he earned a PhD (doctor of philosophy degree) in 1949.

He then studied at the Carl Jung Institute in Zürich, where he received a degree in analytical psychology in 1954.

In 1957 he continued his research career at the University of El Salvador.

In 1960, Donald deAvila Jackson arranged for him to go to Palo Alto to do research at the Mental Research Institute (MRI).

Starting in 1967 he taught psychiatry at Stanford University.

At the Mental Research Institute Watzlawick followed in the footsteps of Gregory Bateson and the research team (Jackson, John Weakland, Jay Haley) responsible for introducing what became known as the "double bind" theory of schizophrenia.

Double bind can be defined as a person trapped under mutually-exclusive expectations.

Watzlawick's 1967 work based on Bateson's thinking, Pragmatics of Human Communication, with Don Jackson and Janet Beavin, became a cornerstone work of communication theory.

Other scientific contributions include works on radical constructivism and most importantly his theory on communication.

He was active in the field of family therapy.

Watzlawick was one of the three founding members of the Brief Therapy Center at MRI.

He was licensed as a psychologist in California from 1969 to 1998, when he stopped seeing patients.

Watzlawick was married (Vera) and had two stepdaughters (Yvonne and Joanne).

A cardiac arrest at his home in Palo Alto caused his death at the age of 85.

Watzlawick did extensive research on how communication is effected within families.

Watzlawick defines five basic axioms in his theory on communication, popularly known as the "Interactional View".

The Interactional View is an interpretive theory drawing from the cybernetic tradition.

Watzlawick considered five axioms as a prerequisite for functioning communication process and competence between two individuals or an entire family.

According to him, miscommunication happens because not all of the communicators are "speaking the same language".

This happens because people have different viewpoints of speaking.

With an underlying cybernetic structure, Watzawick considered causality of a circular, feedback nature, with information as a core element.

it is concerned with the processes of communication within systems of the widest sense and therefore also with human systems, e.g., families, large organizations and international relations.

Within the "Interactional View" communication is based on what is happening, and not necessarily associated with who, when, where, or why it takes place.

He studied "Normal" as well as the "disturbed" family in order to infer conditions conducive to the approach of interaction-orientation.

He believed that individual personality, character, and deviance are shaped by the individual's relations with his fellows.

He saw symptoms, defenses, character structure and personality as terms describing the individual's typical interactions, which occur in response to a particular interpersonal context.

The Interactional View requires a network of communication rules that govern a family homeostasis, which is the tacit collusion of family members to maintain the status quo.

Even if the status quo is negative it can still be hard to change.

Interactional theorists believe that a person will fail to recognize this destructive resistance to change unless he or she understand Watzlawick's axioms.

The following axioms can explain how miscommunication can occur if not all the communicators are on the same page.

If one of these axioms is somehow disturbed, communication might fail.

All of these axioms are derived from the work of Gregory Bateson, much of which is collected in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972).

Watzlawick, Beavin Bavelas and Jackson support these axioms to maintain family homeostasis.

Some interrelated notions that make up the Interactional View promoted by Watzlawick and colleagues at the MRI include:

In 1974, members of the Center published a major work on their brief approach, Change, Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution (Watzlawick, Weakland, Fisch).