Pragmatics of Human Communication
One cannot not communicate. The Palo Alto group's founding statement.
If it is accepted that all behavior in an interactional situation has message value, i.e., is communication, it follows that no matter how one may try, one cannot not communicate.
Watzlawick, Beavin Bavelas, and Jackson read symptoms as events in a relationship rather than only as states inside one person. They set out a small number of axioms: behavior carries message value, every exchange defines both content and the relationship between the parties, and each participant punctuates the sequence differently, so both may feel they are only reacting to the other.
For the consulting room, the book supplies a vocabulary for what happens between people. It names the double bind, distinguishes symmetrical from complementary patterns, and shows how a couple or a family can settle into a repeating exchange that neither member chose. Case fragments and literary examples, including a close reading of Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, keep the theory close to observable interaction.
First published in 1967, it remains a reference point for systemic and relational work and for reading distress as pattern.
About the authors
Paul Watzlawick
Paul Watzlawick (1921-2007) was an Austrian-American psychologist, family therapist, and communication theorist. Trained in psychology and philosophy, he worked at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, a base for the Palo Alto group. As lead author of Pragmatics of Human Communication (1967), he formulated axioms of communication, among them that one cannot not communicate, and put forward a constructivist, systemic account of how meaning is made and sustained between people rather than within one mind.
Janet Beavin Bavelas
Janet Beavin Bavelas (born 1940) is an experimental social psychologist and communication scholar based at the University of Victoria, where she is Professor Emeritus. She co-authored Pragmatics of Human Communication (1967) with Paul Watzlawick and Don Jackson. Her research examines gesture, motor mimicry, and nonverbal behaviour in face-to-face dialogue, and she developed the method of microanalysis of face-to-face dialogue. She served as President of the International Society for Gesture Studies from 2005 to 2007.
Don deAvila Jackson
Don D. Jackson (1920 to 1968) was an American psychiatrist and a central figure in the systemic and family-therapy tradition. Trained under Harry Stack Sullivan, he worked alongside Gregory Bateson on the double bind theory of schizophrenia and developed the concept of family homeostasis. In 1958 he founded the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto. He co-authored Pragmatics of Human Communication (1967) with Paul Watzlawick and Janet Beavin, a study of how communication patterns organise relationships.
Details
- 1967
- English
- W. W. Norton
- W. W. Norton, 1967
- 304
- 9780393710595