保罗·瓦兹拉威克

保罗·瓦兹拉威克（德语：Paul Watzlawick，1921年7月25日—2007年3月31日）是一位出生于奥地利的美籍家庭治疗师、心理学家、传播理论学家与哲学家，是传播理论的领军人物。在家庭治疗和一般心理治疗上也有很高的成就。

Paul Watzlawick (July 25, 1921 – March 31, 2007) was an Austrian-American family therapist, psychologist, communication theorist, and philosopher. A theoretician in communication theory and radical constructivism, he commented in the fields of family therapy and general psychotherapy. Watzlawick believed that people create their own suffering in the very act of trying to fix their emotional problems. He was one of the most influential figures at the Mental Research Institute and lived and worked in Palo Alto, California.

Early life and education

Paul Watzlawick was born in Villach, Austria in 1921, the son of a bank director. After he graduated from high school in 1939, Watzlawick studied philosophy and philology at the Università Ca' Foscari Venice and he earned a PhD in 1949. He then studied at the Carl Jung Institute in Zürich, where he received a degree in analytical psychology in 1954. In 1957 he continued his research career at the University of El Salvador.

Career

In 1960, Donald deAvila Jackson arranged for him to go to Palo Alto to do research at the Mental Research Institute (MRI). Starting in 1967 he taught psychiatry at Stanford University.

At the Mental Research Institute Watzlawick followed in the footsteps of Gregory Bateson and the research team (Jackson, John Weakland, Jay Haley) responsible for introducing what became known as the "double bind" theory of schizophrenia. Double bind can be defined as a person trapped under mutually-exclusive expectations. Watzlawick's 1967 work based on Bateson's thinking, Pragmatics of Human Communication, with Don Jackson and Janet Beavin, became a cornerstone work of communication theory. Other scientific contributions include works on radical constructivism and most importantly his theory on communication. He was active in the field of family therapy.

Watzlawick was one of the three founding members of the Brief Therapy Center at MRI. In 1974, members of the Center published a major work on their brief approach, Change, Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution (Watzlawick, Weakland, Fisch).

He was licensed as a psychologist in California from 1969 to 1998, when he stopped seeing patients.

Personal life

Watzlawick was married (Vera) and had two stepdaughters (Joanne and Evonne). A cardiac arrest at his home in Palo Alto caused his death at the age of 85.

Work

Interactional view

Watzlawick did extensive research on how communication is effected within families. Watzlawick defines five basic axioms in his theory on communication, popularly known as the "Interactional View". The Interactional View is an interpretive theory drawing from the cybernetic tradition. Watzlawick considered five axioms as a prerequisite for functioning communication process and competence between two individuals or an entire family. According to him, miscommunication happens because not all of the communicators are "speaking the same language". This happens because people have different viewpoints of speaking. With an underlying cybernetic structure, Watzlawick considered causality of a circular, feedback nature, with information as a core element. it is concerned with the processes of communication within systems of the widest sense and therefore also with human systems, e.g., families, large organizations and international relations.

Within the "Interactional View" communication is based on what is happening, and not necessarily associated with who, when, where, or why it takes place. He studied "Normal" as well as the "disturbed" family in order to infer conditions conducive to the approach of interaction-orientation. He believed that individual personality, character, and deviance are shaped by the individual's relations with his fellows. He saw symptoms, defenses, character structure and personality as terms describing the individual's typical interactions, which occur in response to a particular interpersonal context.