Obituary: Paul Watzlawick

Wed Apr 4 00:50:07 PDT 2007

Thank you for posting this, Holger.  Paul Watzlawick also had a deep impact
on me.  In 1984, my husband and I attended one of the first mult-field
systems conferences sponsored by the Mental Research Institute.  It was my
first experience having "coffee break conversations" with biologists,
psychologists, economists, sociologists, etc. which led me to consider that
nothing is random and that everything is self-organized.

I am so grateful for all that I learned from Paul and his collaborative
work.

Christine

CWS - Collaborative Wisdom & Strategy
Christine Whitney Sanchez
2717 E. Mountain Sky Avenue
Phoenix, AZ  85048
480.759.0262
www.christinewhitneysanchez.com <http://www.christinewhitneysanchez.com/> 

  _____  

From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of Holger
Nauheimer
Sent: Monday, April 02, 2007 2:08 PM
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Subject: Obituary: Paul Watzlawick

Obituary:
<http://www.change-management-blog.com/2007/04/obituary-paul-watzlawick.html
> 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 Mental
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Research_Institute_of_Palo_Alto>
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 Gregory Bateson
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Bateson> ) developed the Double Bind
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Bind>  theory. Other scientific
contributions include works on radical
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivist_epistemology#Radical_constructi
vism> 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 1950s. 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 Washingtons 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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