From the Interactional View—A Conversation with Paul Watzlawick

Abstract

Psychiatry, 1 came across the work of the Bateson group. I was particularly impressed by their work on communication in schizophrenia, the double-bind theory, and other topics that, at the time, were really quite revolutionary. People at Temple were impressed by this work too, so I decided to meet Dr. Don Jackson-then a consultant to the Bateson group-when he visited Philadelphia in October 1960. As it turned out, Dr. Jackson was in the habit of picking up stray dogs, and he said "All right, come out to Palo Alto and let's see what we can do."Jackson had founded MRI about a year and a half before that, so that what is loosely called the "Palo Alto Group" was really two groups. The Bateson group, at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Menlo Park, was studying schizophrenic communication at that time, but had also done work with dogs for the blind, studied animal play at the San Francisco Zoo, and had done a number of other very interesting studies with ventriloquists and with hypnotists and so on. They were investigating communication on a very wide range, but always on the principle that communication has a pragmatic, behavioral effect. After Jackson founded his group at MRI in late '58, the two groups coexisted very closely in terms of joint staff meetings, joint case discussions, and so on. I joined Jackson's group at MRI, which at the time was part of the Palo Alto Medical Research Foundation. There was never any formal synthesis of the two groups. They were just two independent groups with Gregory Bateson as the great theoretical mentor and Jackson as the great clinician. Wilder: You have argued that the approach of the Palo Alto Group-the tnteractional view" or the "new communication," as it's been variously called-is epistemologically discontinuous from the Freudian intrapsychic psychoanalytic paradigm. How is this so?Watzlawick: You see, what I think was so absolutely new in Bateson's approach to psychiatric problems was due to the fact that he is, among other things, an anthropologist. He therefore approached the phenomena of so-called psychopathological behavior in the way an anthropologist would look at the functioning of a strange culture. When he goes out in the field to look at a culture that is not his own, he does so with a minimum of preconceived notions.He tries to see what they are doing and not have prior ideas about why they are doing what they're doing.This differs from the orthodox psychiatric approach where there is a theoretical model of the human mind, and one looks at disturbed behavior and tries to understand it in terms of this more or less preconceived idea of what goes on inside a person's mind. In that sense, the two views are totally discontinuous because the orthodox view takes the mind as the ultimate unit of study, while the approach that Bateson pioneered takes into account what goes on between people, and how that influences behavior. And, further, how the behavior of one ''.

Emotional versus neutral expressions and perceptions of social dominance and submissiveness.

“…As Watzlawick famously noted "one cannot not communicate" (cf. Wilder, 1978) and hence not reacting to a situation signals something about the person who does not react. More specifically, recently it has been argued that restrained emotion displays are suggestive of mastery of one's live and of competence in general (Warner & Shields, 2007)-conversely, relaxedness, as far as this is reflected in one's voice, is associated with high status and dominance (Hall & Friedman, 1999).…”

The Form and Function of Quality Communication in Marriage

“…Adaptability may be indicated by simply not communicating a particular message. In a recent interview (Wilder, 1978), Paul Watzlawick suggested, "...a large part of communication consists in knowing what one is not supposed to say, not supposed to think, not supposed to see, not supposed to hear" (p. 41).…”

Climate Conscious Relations in a Digital Urban Setting

“…In one sense, the presence of another assumes communication (explicitly or implicitly, consciously or unconsciously) in that as stated by Watzlawicks: "One cannot not communicate" [42]. Everything communicates.…”