<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 * * ========================================================== [email protected] ------------------------------ To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your options, view the archives of [email protected]: http://listserv.boisestate.edu/archives/oslist.html To learn about OpenSpaceEmailLists and OSLIST FAQs: http://www.openspaceworld.org/oslist
