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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