Obituary: Paul Watzlawick
Holger Nauheimer
holger at change-facilitation.org
Mon Apr 2 14:08:11 PDT 2007
<http://www.change-management-blog.com/2007/04/obituary-paul-watzlawick.html>Obituary:
Paul Watzlawick (*1921, Villach - 2007, Palo Alto)
"This is the secret of propaganda: To totally saturate the person,
whom the propaganda wants to lay hold of, with the ideas of the
propaganda, without him even noticing that he is being saturated."
Paul Watzlawick has died. Few people have had such a deep impact on
the theory of communication, and in a broader sense, on Change
Management, and nobody has written such compelling and at the same
time entertaining books. I rarely deliver a training workshop without
citing one or two of his anecdotes. My generation grew up with his
book "In Pursuit of Unhappiness".
After he graduated from high school in 1939 in Villach, Paul
Watzlawick studied psychology and at the University of Venice and
graduated in 1949. He then worked at the C. G. Jung Institute in
Zurich. In 1957 he continued his researching career at the University
of El Salvador. In 1960, Don. D. Jackson arranged for him to come to
Palo Alto to do research at the
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Research_Institute_of_Palo_Alto>Mental
Research Institute of Palo Alto. Beginning in 1967 he has taught
psychiatry at Stanford University. He died, aged 85 in California.
In Palo Alto, Watzlawick and his colleagues (most notably
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Bateson>Gregory Bateson)
developed the <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Bind>Double Bind
theory. Other scientific contributions include works on
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivist_epistemology#Radical_constructivism>radical
constructivism and most importantly his theory on communication. Both
he and Gregory Bateson have been a very important inspiration in the
field of family therapy. He defines 5 basic axioms in his theory on
communication that are necessary to have a functioning communication
between two individuals. If one of these axioms is somehow disturbed,
communication might fail.
1. One Cannot Not Communicate: Every behaviour is a kind of
communication. Because behaviour does not have a counterpart (there
is no anti-behaviour), it is not possible not to communicate.
2. Every communication has a content and relationship aspect such
that the latter classifies the former and is therefore a
metacommunication: This means that all communication includes, apart
from the plain meaning of words, more information - information on
how the talker wants to be understood and how he himself sees his
relation to the receiver of information.
3. The nature of a relationship is dependent on the punctuation of
the partners communication procedures: Both the talker and the
receiver of information structure the communication flow differently
and therefore interpret their own behaviour during communicating as
merely a reaction on the other's behaviour (i.e. every partner thinks
the other one is the cause of a specific behaviour). Human
communication cannot be desolved into plain causation and reaction
strings, communication rather appears to be cyclic.
4. Human communication involves both digital and analog modalities:
Communication does not involve the merely spoken words (digital
communication), but non-verbal and analog-verbal communication as well.
5. Inter-human communication procedures are either symmetric or
complementary, depending on whether the relationship of the partners
is based on differences or parity.
I will always think of his Seattle story (from his book: "How Real is
Real"): In his book 'How Real Is Real? : Confusion, Disinformation,
Communication' he describes a phenomenon which occurred in Seattle at
the end of the 1950's. Many owners of vehicles realized, that their
windscreens were full of small scratches. A commission sent by
President Eisenhower investigated the phenomenon and found out that
among the citizens of Seattle there were two persisting theories
about the causes of that phenomenon: one part attributed the damage
to a suspected Russian nuclear test, and the other to a chemical
reaction of the fresh tarmac which had been put on the State of
Washington's highways. After the investigation was completed, the
commission concluded that there was no significant increase of
scratched windscreens in Seattle.
We will miss him a lot, we lost one of our strongest sources of
wisdom and humanity.
Holger Nauheimer
*
*
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