Paul Watzlawick – Unknotting the tangles of communication and life
Above the desk in my office is a poster of Rudolf Carnap lying on a rock. I don’t suppose that many other people have chosen this decoration as their Zoom backdrop, visible to all callers and never out of view. It came from a 2015 exhibition at the University of Vienna about the work of Carnap and the Vienna Circle in their pre-WWII endeavours to bring logic and science to the service of communication and language. The exhibition was entitled Exact Thinking In Demented Times, which is a good summary of the Vienna Circle’s project in developing logical positivism as an attempt to bring rigour to the concept of meaning. Carnap and his colleagues tried, and ultimately failed, to show that meaning resided in verifiable facts rather than metaphysical statements. I admire Carnap not because his ideas were right, but because the questions they raised were necessary. Someone to tackle them to show that they were (broadly) wrong, paving the way for the work of Paul Watzlawick.
Watzlawick, like Carnap, was Austrian. He never lost the poise and elegance of the Austrian gentleman, impeccably turned out and unfailingly polite. Also like Carnap, he moved from Europe to the United States, although in happier circumstances. He first trained at the Carl Gustav Jung Institute in Zurich (where he later said that he “learned almost everything about Siberian creation myths, but nothing at all about what to do with a person who chewed his fingernails” (Watzlawick, 1994). Travelling via a research post in El Salvador, he ran into Gregory Bateson and his work which “totally changed my outlook” (ibid).
Watzlawick arrived at the Mental Research Institute (MRI), Palo Alto in 1960 to join Don Jackson, John Weakland, Jay Haley and others at a most exciting time. The foundations of family therapy were coming into place, and the group had carte blanche to look at communications as they connected to families in general, and troubled families in particular. Over the next two decades he found a place as the theoretician in practice, alongside his colleagues who were perhaps more focused on practice with theory. He was key in producing Pragmatics of Human Communication (Watzlawick, Bavelas and Jackson, 1967), a far-from-easy read which presented an over-arching framework with much greater subtlety and practical application than anything proposed by the Vienna Circle. This work is still very much with us today, taken forward by Janet Bavelas who worked on the book as a graduation student and is now still at work on micro-analysing actual therapeutic communication to show how interactions combine for effect (McKergow, 2013). These are forming the basis for the next generation of Solution Focused therapy practice (McKergow, 2021).
As well as contributions to work by the MRI team including Change (Watzlawick, Weakland and Fisch, 1974), Paul Watzlawick also published his own work which combined dazzling perceptiveness with amusing and intriguing stories and illustrations. The illustration of two sailors trying to steady a (steady) boat in Change conveys pretty much everything about schismogenesis, the creation of division in families and elsewhere, in one easy-to-grasp image.
How Real Is Real (Watzlawick, 1977) is a particular favourite of mine, with its stories of everyday events and how perceptions turn on the most unexpected things. This wonderful collection about how communicational paradoxes are never far away rings even more true now that it would have at the time, with rumours, half-truths and plain falsehoods flying around. His tale of Dr. Alex Bavelas showing how complicated language was impressive and beguiling played a key role in setting up my plea for simplicity in The Solutions Focus book (Jackson and McKergow 2002). His analysis of how anti-Semitic works can stir up hatred without ever being read is unsettling and all too familiar to us now. His experiment of bringing two psychiatrists together, each on the grounds that they would be interviewing a mental patient who thought he was a psychiatrist, is genius. (The experiment failed after a few moments, when one psychiatrist recalled that he had heard of the other.)
In the days of informed consent and ethics committees it is hard to see how this kind of work, relying as it does on deception, can be studied. In Watzlawick’s time these were mostly studied within relationships, families and organisations; we need his guidance even more when whole countries are embarked on communicational confusion and self-harm. Unfortunately, the antics of populist leaders are not bound by ethic committees.
I was lucky enough to meet Paul Watzlawick and be taught (a little) by him in the mid-1990s when we visited the MRI for an intensive training and a conference. I was stuck at the time about how the three surviving MRI pioneers were so different – Watzlawick the suave European, the ex-engineer John Weakland and the wise-cracking Dick Fisch, had worked together for four decades and produced ideas and material which is still not only in circulation, but is again proving itself relevant and enlightening. We met all three, and it was Paul who I most wanted to see.
Social construction pioneer Ken Gergen, a member of the following generation of theoreticians, says that we carry everyone we meet around with us in some way. Paul Watzlawick is still with me – in my teaching stories, on my bookshelf, in my memories. So here is a heel-click to an extraordinary man on his centenary. I am delighted to make a contribution to this collection in his honour and raise a glass (of apricot schnapps, perhaps) to his memory and his work.
References
Jackson, P. Z. & McKergow, M. (2002). The Solutions Focus: The SIMPLE way to positive change. London: Nicholas Brealey publishing.
McKergow, M. (2013). Fifty years of the interactional view: An interview with Janet Bavelas. InterAction 5(2), 92-116. Retrieved from http://sfwork.com/resources/interaction/09_McKergow.pdf
McKergow, M. (2021). The Next Generation of Solution Focused Practice. London: Routledge (in press).
Watzlawick, P. (1977). How Real Is Real? Confusion, Disinformation, Communication. New York NY: Random House
Watzlawick, P. (1994). The Constructions of Clinical Realities . The Global Reach of Brief Therapy conference, 26/27 August 1994, Sunny Vale CA. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/OT8Ud8eTrc0.
Watzlawick, P., Bavelas, J. B. & Jackson, D. (1967). Pragmatics of Human Communication: A study of interactional patterns, pathologies and paradoxes. New York NY: W. W. Norton.
Watzlawick, P., Weakland. J. & Fisch, R. (1974). Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution. New York NY: W. W. Norton.
THE AUTHOR: Dr. Mark McKergow is co-director of sfwork – The Centre for Solutions Focus at Work. He is an international consultant, speaker and author. Many people around the world have been inspired by his work in Solutions Focus – presented with his inimitable blend of scientific rigour and performance. Mark is a global pioneer applying Solutions Focus ideas to organisational and personal change. He was instrumental in the founding of the SolWorld and is a founder member of SFCT, the professional body for SF consultants, coaches and managers. An accomplished musician, Mark is fascinated by links between music, learning and the brain. A scientist by training and by nature, Mark continues to seek simplicity and reliability in learning and change.