Journal of Systemic Therapies, Vol. 29, No. 2, 2010, pp.

53–68

Special Series
◊ ◊ ◊
ON HUMAN COMMUNICATION (1964)1
PAUL WATZLAWICK
DON D. JACKSON

I like to imagine an instrument which would enable us to break up patterns of suicidal behavior as
the physicist breaks up a beam of light. Looking through this sociological spectroscope we would
see spread out under the diffraction grating the rainbow-colored spectrum of all possible human
attitudes to life. The whole distressing muddle would become neat, clear and comprehensive.
(From: The Yogi and the Commissar by Arthur Koestler)

Like any other discipline, psychiatry is contingent on its own basic premises. The
psychiatrist’s assumptions about the nature of the human mind will determine and
limit the scope, direction and outcome of his endeavors. But much more than any
other discipline, psychiatry is ultimately self-reflective: subject and object are
identical, the mind studies itself, and any assumption have an inevitable tendency
towards self-validation. Hence the constant quest for an Archimedean point which
has led to a search for a satisfactory analogy of the mind in other fields of knowledge.
The dominant epistemological (origin, nature, methods and limits of knowing)
model of each period is eventually also applied to the soul and thus we see the
theological model of the Middle Ages replaced by a deification of Reason, and
this goddess in turn dethroned by the romantically soulful notions of the natural
philosophers and their all but forgotten discovery of the unconscious. The 19th
century established the application of the medical model and at the beginning of
our century psychiatry received its greatest impetus from the application of the first
law of thermodynamics to the phenomena of mental functioning.
These phenomena were then seen as the outcome of a hypothesized interplay
of forces, which appeared to follow very closely the laws of conservation and
transformation of energy in physics, where, to quote Norbert Wiener, “materialism
had apparently put its own grammar in order, and this grammar was dominated

1In W. Ray & G. Nardone, (Eds.), (2009). Paul Watzlawick—Insight May Cause Blindness & other Es-
says, Phoenix, AZ: Zeig, Tucker, Theisan, Ltd., pp. 7–24. This paper was originally scheduled to appear
in 1964 in Scientific American, but never published until 2009 when it appeared in Dr. Watzlawick’s
selected papers. This work was aided by the Ampex Foundation, the Charles E. Merrill Trust, and the
Max C. Fleischmann Foundation of Nevada.

53
54 Watzlawick and Jackson

by the concept of energy.”2 Freud’s psychodynamic viewpoint is thus of necessity

an intrapsychic, causal, deterministic one which conceives of the here and now as
the result of all past causes.
In view of this historical dependence of psychiatric thinking on the domi-
nant epistemology of a given period, it is not surprising that psychiatry, and
the behavioral sciences in general, are being deeply affected by the rapid
evolution of knowledge since the end of World War II. Among the many
new dimensions there is one of particular impact on our knowledge of man:
that of information in addition to the classic concepts of matter and energy. The
discovery that information about an effect, if properly fed back to the effector, will
ensure the latter’s internal stability and its adaptation to environmental change, not
only opened the door for the construction of higher-order (i.e. error-controlled, goal-
seeking) machines and led to the postulation of cybernetics (methods of control and
communication common to living things and machines) as a new epistemology,
but also provided completely new insights into the functioning of biological and
sociological systems.
The transition from psychodynamics as an explanatory principle—to the anal-
ysis of communication parallels the evolution from conventional mechanics to
cybernetics. In both instances, the new model adds a completely new dimension
to the old one. As is known, the psychoanalytic model of the mind postulates the
ego as a mediator between the forces of the id, the demands of the superego, and
the contingencies of the environment. The early writings of Freud and his school
were almost exclusively concerned with the id and its dynamics; superego explo-
ration came somewhat later, while ego psychology is a relatively recent addition
to psychoanalytic research. These developments strikingly parallel the steps from
Virchwian (German anthropologist, political leader, 1821–1902) pathology (origin,
nature, cause of disease) via physiology to epidemiology. Interestingly enough
however, the interdependence between the organism and the environment—although
basically acknowledged—remained a curiously neglected field of study, and it is
precisely here that the concept of information exchange, i.e. of communication,
becomes indispensable.
An eminent psychiatrist, Thomas Hora, has stated: “To understand himself,
man needs to be understood by another. To be understood by another, he needs
to understand the other.” This cogent statement presupposes that the individuals
involved are able to communicate with one another. It also implies that without
other people to communicate to, a man would not only find himself lonely, but
confused as well. Even Descartes’ dictum “Cogito, ergo sum—I think, therefore
I am,” although meant to be axiomatic, ultimately amounts to self-awareness in
terms of relationship. For there can be no thought without a content or object and
outside a context; thought in and by itself is unthinkable. Consequently, without

2Freud’s psychodynamic viewpoint is thus of necessity an intrapsychic, causal, deterministic one which

conceives of the here and now as the result of all past causes.
On Human Communication 55

‘something’ to think about not even Descartes would have been aware of himself.
To this consideration general semantics would probably add another weighty one:
the word is not the thing and ‘cogito,’ ‘ergo,’ and ‘sum’ are abstractions of com-
plexly structured relations.
The communicational approach to the phenomena of human behavior—both
normal and abnormal—is based on the observable manifestations of relationship
in the widest sense, and not on hypothetical entities inside the mind, as postulated
by psychodynamics. This orientation brings the study of human communication
into the highly respectable company of mathematics which, after all, is the one
science most immediately concerned with the measurement of relations between,
not the nature of things. Regretfully we must hasten to add that this affinity of our
study with mathematics also terminates just about here: we are still a long way
from a mathematical model of human communication; or, in the words of Warren
S. McCulloch:

We still lack a realistic logic, even a useful calculus, of relations of more than two
relata. A gave B to C, A looks like B to C, A thinks, believes, hopes, dreams that B is
C—are all beyond our comprehension. If and when we psychiatrists talk nonsense of
these relations—and we do—all we can plead is that the proper calculus is still to seek.

It should not, therefore, surprise the reader that what follows now will inevitably
be of a very fragmentary character. The study of human communication, as defined
by us elsewhere, is the investigation of the ways people affect one another by the
message character of their behavior, of the ways they confirm or disconfirm, inspire
or drive each other crazy.
More generally still we might say that it is the study of the interaction between
human organisms and their environment, perceived by them as reality, and thus of
their specific patterns and experiences of being in the world. If we now hyphen-
ate these last four words it becomes apparent that communications theory must
acknowledge its affinity with yet another realm, namely existential philosophy
which studies man in the Here and Now of his being and, unlike other philosophies,
takes into account that there are such things as emotional disorders. Having thus
tried to define our field of study and to chart its position, let us now continue in a
more practical, lighter vein.

FROM SMALL TALK TO GIBBERISH

Small talk is not really small. In fact, the art of saying nothing by saying something
requires both talent and practice. Suppose you are on a plane and fate has placed in
the seat next to you a fellow passenger who is determined to while away his time by
making conversation. In this simple situation you will quickly discover for yourself
some of the basic facts of human communication. First of all: you cannot physically
56 Watzlawick and Jackson

leave the field, and this places you at the mercy of your talkative neighbor. Your next
discovery will be that—much as you would like to—you cannot not communicate
with him. You may, for instance, try to feign sleepiness. If you are lucky, this may
shut him up—he literally “gets your message.” In other words: even your having
reclined your seat and lying there with your eyes closed is a message, a non-verbal
communication, and you will have to continue it, for as soon as you re-open your
eyes, he may start talking again. There are, of course, other possibilities. You may
either ignore him or make it clear, more or less bluntly and in so many words, that
you are not interested in conversation. Whether he seems hurt by this or not and
whether you admit it to yourself or not, the ensuing silence is likely to be a rather
embarrassed and strained one—so much so that you may even prefer not to go
to the toilet in order to avoid having to climb over his legs and apologize for the
disturbance. Needless to say, you will be secretly furious with him for creating this
ridiculous situation, and with yourself for your helplessness.
Your alternative would be to give in and make conversation. But unless you do
not mind baring your soul to this experienced conversationalist, you will soon ap-
preciate the wisdom of the Army rule: In case of capture give only name, rank and
serial number. For he will not be content with learning your views on the weather,
but will want to know all about you, including your thoughts, feelings and beliefs.
And once you have started talking, you will find it much more difficult than before
to remain in control of the situation.
This is where the art of Small Talk as a defense comes in. It consists of a hun-
dred little tricks, all designed to make communication meaningless. Some of them
have names, such as switching the subject, (slightly connected) tangentializations,
incomplete sentences, deliberate misunderstanding, obscure style or mannerisms
of speech, the literal interpretation of metaphor and the metaphorical interpreta-
tion of literality, and probably many others which still await their classification
by a conscientious communications expert. Internationally, the Italians lead the
field with their inimitable response “ma . . .” which—strictly speaking—means
“but,” while in actual fact it can mean doubt, agreement, disagreement, bewilder-
ment, indifference, surprise, anger, resignation, lack of interest, sarcasm—maybe
a dozen more things and therefore nothing. Another splendid example of this type
of communication is given in the opening scene of the motion picture “Lolita,”
where Quilty, threatened by the pistol-wielding Humbert, goes into a paroxysm
of verbal and non-verbal gibberish, while his rival tries in vain to get across his
message: “Look, I am going to shoot you!” Is this mere panic or a clever defense?
Only on the surface, it may seem surprising that his kind of communication is
typical of so-called mentally disturbed individuals who are caught in the identical
dilemma. They, too, cannot leave the field, they cannot not communicate, but for
very good reasons they are afraid or unwilling to communicate, and eventually either
withdraw or produce verbal and non-verbal gibberish. It is one of the postulates
of the communicational approach that a piece of behavior can only be understood
within the context in which it occurs. This means that at the clinical end of the
On Human Communication 57

behavioral spectrum, “crazy” behavior is not necessarily the manifestation of a sick

mind, but may be the only possible reaction to an absurd or untenable communica-
tional context. Seen in this light the terms “sanity” and “insanity” practically lose
their meaning as attributes of individuals.
Recently, on a television program, the Colonel asked his Sergeant what time
it was. “Ten minutes to something,” replied the Sergeant. The Colonel, irritated,
stated “That doesn’t help me any. Ten minutes to what?” “I don’t know,” replied
the Sergeant, “because I’ve lost my minute hand.” It was impossible to tell from
the context in which this speech occurred whether this was a double joke, that is,
he not only lost a hand from his wristwatch and continued to wear it, but it was the
hour hand that was telling him what the minute hand should have told, or whether
this was simply a slip on the actor’s part, and he meant to say—“I have lost my
hour hand.”
This kind of puzzlement about what is being communicated is an all too frequent
occurrence with most of us. We rely heavily on context and on non-verbal commu-
nication, as well as on words, in order to get the other person’s meaning. However,
we are often not aware of doing so until a situation arises where contextual or other
clues are missing, and we find ourselves very puzzled.

THE PLIGHT OF THE LONE DISSENTER

In a series of by now classic experiments, Asch provided evidence for the almost
unbelievable power of communication over the mental functioning of otherwise
perfectly normal individuals. Briefly, in these experiments a group of college stu-
dents were subjected to a number of very simple tests of visual perception: they had
to indicate which two of three parallel lines were longer. However, all except one
student (the actual subject) had previously been briefed to give unanimously the
identical wrong response. They were seated so that the unbriefed and unsuspecting
student’s turn always came last, i.e., after all the others had matter-of-factly and
unanimously stated their “guess.” It was found that under these circumstances only
very few subjects had the strength to rely on their own perceptions and to maintain
and defend them in the face of massive group disqualification. Seventy-five per cent
agreed with the majority in varying degrees, some blindly others with considerable
anxiety and a feeling of depersonalization.
Unfortunately, Asch’s findings are by no means an academic affair. Virtually
the same communicational context can be found with distressing frequency in the
family background of schizophrenic patients. As though by secret convention these
families unanimously insist that no one is unhappy about anything other than the
fact that their son or daughter happens to be sick. This places the patient in very
much the same situation as Asch’s subjects; except that for obvious reasons it is
infinitely more difficult to be a minority of one in ones own family than in a group
of unrelated students. These patients live in a world, which is constantly labeled
58 Watzlawick and Jackson

for them by their families as normal, while in actual fact even a brief interview
with the whole family may open truly chaotic vistas. The patient is thus faced
with the dilemma of either freeing himself from his label as the sole source of
all the trouble and misery by pointing to the family’s real problems, or doubting
his own perceptions. Just as the above-mentioned student, he is more likely to
choose the latter alternative. One such decision paves the way for another and
so on ad infinitum.
This brings us to another postulate of theory: the shift from the individual mind
to the communicational context makes it less important to search for the origin of
a specific piece of behavior (e.g. a symptom) in the past than to study its function
in the here and now. After all, there is probably no individual life history which
does not offer potential starting points for just about all the functional symptoms
described in a good textbook of psychiatry.

THE SYMPTOM AS COMMUNICATION

Let us return once more to our two fictitious airplane passengers and look more
closely at the communicational meaning of passenger A’s non-verbal message “I
am tired.” We assumed that this will silence passenger B. Now, on a more abstract
level, A is doing something very intricate. He does not want to appear impolite
and simply ask B to be silent, since by the rules of society this could be called
rude. Instead, by closing his eyes, etc., he communicates non-verbally: “I would
not mind talking to you, but something stronger than I, namely my tiredness, for
which I cannot be blamed, prevents me.” In our example this invocation of powers or
reasons beyond one’s control still has a rub: A knows that he really is cheating. But
the communicational “ploy” becomes perfect, once a person has convinced himself
that he is at the mercy of forces beyond his control and thereby has freed himself
of both the blame by significant others as well as the pangs of his own conscience.
This, however, is just a more complicated way of saying he has a (psychoneurotic,
psychosomatic, or psychotic) symptom. Margaret Mead, in describing the difference
between American and Russian personalities, remarked that an American might
use the excuse of having a headache to get out of going to a party but the Russian
would actually have the headache.
This communicational definition of a symptom may seem to contain a moot
assumption, namely that one can convince oneself in this way. Instead of digging
in behind the rather unconvincing argument that everyday clinical experience
fully supports this assumption, we should like to mention another psychological
experiment. A subject is placed in front of a tachistoscope, a device by which
words can be made visible for very brief periods of time in a small window. The
list of test words is composed of neutral and “critical,” or emotionally toned
words (e.g. rape, filth, whore). The subject’s threshold is first determined for a
few trial words and he is then instructed to report to the experimenter whatever
On Human Communication 59

he sees or thinks he sees on each subsequent exposure. A comparison between the

subject’s performance with the neutral and with the embarrassing words shows
significantly higher thresholds of recognition for the latter. But this means that
in order to produce more failures with the socially tabooed words, the subject
must first identify them as such and then somehow convince himself that he was
unable to read them. The obvious pay-off is that he spares himself the embar-
rassment of having to read them aloud to the experimenter.3 Let us recapitulate.
Communications theory conceives of a symptom as the non-verbal message: It is
not I who does not (or does) want to do this, it is something outside my control,
e.g. nerves, my illness, my anxiety, my bad eyes, alcohol, my upbringing, the
communists, or my wife.

THE GAME WITHOUT AN END

Children sometimes invent a game which essentially consists in the substitu-

tion of ‘yes’ for ‘no’ and vice versa. In other words, they agree that whatever
they are going to say will mean its opposite. Thus, “I don’t want a piece of your
candy” means “I want a piece,” “It is late” means “It is early” and so forth. This
sovereign manipulation of meaning is fascinating (and not only to children) and
the game is great fun as long as it lasts. But the reader may already anticipate a
fatal complication: there is no way of stopping it. Once the rules have been set
and agreed upon, the game gets out of its inventors’ hands. How can they revert
to normal communication? The message “Let’s not play this any more” means
“Let’s continue playing,” if understood within the frame set by the rule of inver-
sion. The message “Let’s continue playing it,” on the other hand, may either
be taken as simply a reiteration of the original agreement; or, if understood as
being made within the frame of the rules, it merely means “Let’s stop playing,”
but offers no guarantee that thereby the orderly universe in which “yes” means
“yes” and “no” means “no” is re-established in everybody’s mind. We knew a
little girl who was so frightened by this unexpected disappearance of her familiar
world of meaning that she nearly went into a tantrum. A minute later, however,
she found the solution. She ran for help to her mother, who had not participated
in the game, and had mother rule by edict that the game was now over and that
everybody had to talk normally again.4

3We want to mention only in passing that in general psychological testing has more or less neglected
to look at the communicational context of any testing arrangement. There can hardly be any doubt that
it makes quite a difference to the subject and his performance whether he has to communicate with a
shrivelled old professor, a robot, or a beautiful blonde. . . .
4An analogous situation exists in the United States Senate, where the rule for unlimited debate cannot

be changed within the contingency created by the rule itself. Cloture, of course, is subject to debate and
therefore can be effectively blocked by the use of the prerogative conferred by the rule, i.e. filibuster.
Here, however, there is no outsider who can rule by edict that the game is over.
60 Watzlawick and Jackson

Two levels of abstraction are involved in this game. On the lower level we
find all those communications, which are made within the frame, set by the rule
of inversion of meaning. The rule itself, obviously, belongs to a higher level of
abstraction, for it is a communication about the kind of communication to be used
by the players, i.e. a meta-communication. In other words, the game is based on
the rule that “every communication means its opposite,” but this rule is not subject
to itself; rather, in order to be understood, agreed upon and obeyed, the rule itself
must be subject to a meta-rule: “every communication means what it means and
nothing else.” Were it not so, the game could not be planned and played. We thus
realize that two mutually exclusive and contradictory rules are applied to the two
levels respectively. Please note that this contradiction is not a simple one, as for
instance the absurd request “Go away closer,” but that it is peculiarly complicated
as a result of its involving two different levels. If these two levels could be neatly
separated, both in speaking and in thinking, no confusion could arise. But this would
require two separate languages, while in actual fact we have only one. As we have
seen, the message “Let’s stop playing this game” is meaningful at both levels, but
the two meanings are contradictory. This is why, once the game is under way, it
becomes undecidable what a communication means, for it may equally well mean
what it says or its opposite.
An identical problem, arising from the confusion of levels, has been known
to mathematicians for a long time. As far back as 1899, David Hilbert attempted
the axiomatization of geometry and coined the term meta-mathematics for any
statements or rules the relations of which obtain in a given mathematical system.
Hilbert clearly recognized that these statements or rules are not themselves part
of, and therefore are not contained within, that system. It would appear that all
the famous paradoxes, from Epimenides, the Cretan, who supposedly said “All
Cretans are liars,” to the Richardian and Russellian paradoxes, are based on a
confusion of levels with meta levels. In 1931, the mathematician Kurt Gödel
proved that meta-mathematical statements can be formulated which are formally
undecidable because they assert both themselves and their negations. Gödel
further showed that arithmetic is ultimately incomplete, because its consistency
cannot be proved in its own “language,” i.e. formal arithmetical calculus. It could
only be proved by additional axioms outside the calculus, and these axioms
would in turn be undecidable in and by themselves and would thus lead into an
infinite regress.
If Gödel can be credited with having explored the discontinuity of levels in
mathematical thinking, the merit of having first postulated an analogous hierar-
chy of levels and of having introduced it into psychiatry goes to the anthropolo-
gist Gregory Bateson. He pointed out that repeated learning experiences not only
bring about an increase of knowledge, but also an increased ability to acquire
knowledge. For instance, if someone comes to master several foreign languages,
the outcome is not only a knowledge of several languages, but, generally, also a
greater ease in learning languages. In other words, he not only learned languages,
On Human Communication 61

but also learned to learn languages. For this second order of learning which is
a progressive change in the rate of first-order learning, Bateson coined the term
“deutero-learning, i.e. learning to learn. Obviously, deutero-learning is of a higher,
more abstract logical type than first order learning. Expanding, as Bateson did,
the meaning of “learning” from its formal, scholastic implication to include all
changes within an organism in response to signals from the environment, it can
be seen that deutero-learning refers to those phenomena in which the psychiatrist
is preponderantly interested, namely the changes whereby an individual comes
to act as if he expects his world to be structured in one way rather than another.
His second-order premises about the world are equivalent to the highly com-
plex emotional patterns of relationships which he has abstracted in the course
of his life. It is they which lead him to “punctuate” the sequence of events in
his own unique way and to call the outcome “objective reality.” The parallelism
between Gödell’s proof on the one hand and the phenomena arising from the
level structure of human communication is so impressive that we can only hope
that one day it will be explored by an interdisciplinary team.
For the time being let us merely point out that international relations offer another
example for the game we have just described. There were times when an enemy
general’s word of honor could be trusted implicitly and was, therefore, a more reli-
able factor than a fortress bristling with arms. But the ability to meta-communicate
appropriately has long since been lost and today the meaning of the message “We
want peace” is un-decidable, for it may mean just this, or it may be a ruse and mean
“We want to destroy you.”

“BE SPONTANEOUS!”

Paradox, as we have seen, arises from a confusion of level and meta-level. It

creates a situation in which a statement is true, if false; and false, if true. If all
Cretans are liars, then this statement, made by a Cretan, is a lie, but if it is a lie,
then Epimenides has spoken the truth, and so forth in infinite regress. We shall
now attempt to show how paradox can enter human communication. For this
purpose we shall slightly modify an example taken from Nagel and Neyman. It is
correct to write: Chicago is a populous city. But it is incorrect to write: “Chicago”
has three syllables, for in this context single quotation marks must be used, i.e.
“Chicago” has three syllables. If we now ask ourselves what distinguishes the
two meanings of “Chicago,” we realize that in the first sentence it is used as a
word referring to a vast conglomeration of buildings in a specific geographical
location. In the second sentence, however, this same word refers to a class of
words and has nothing to do with geography. The single quotation marks point
to this difference in the level of abstraction and indicate, as it were, that the word
is to be understood at the appropriate (i.e. meta) level. Next we make the two
sentences into one (Chicago is a populous city and has three syllables), dictate
62 Watzlawick and Jackson

it to our secretary and threaten her with dismissal if she cannot or will not write
it down correctly. Of course, she cannot.
An absurd situation? Admittedly yes, but analogous situations are much more
frequent in human communications than would appear at first sight. All messages
in which spontaneous behavior is demanded by the sender of the message create
such situations. Take, for instance, a wife’s request of her passive husband: “I
want you to dominate me.” The fatal thing about this message is that once it has
been conveyed, there is no way out of the untenable situation created by it—very
much as in the Game Without an End. The husband has only two alternatives: he
can continue in his passive ways and displease her by not respecting her wish, or
he can behave in a more domineering fashion, in which case she will still be dis-
pleased for, after all, he is at a higher level only obeying rather than dominating
her. Even if he now turns into a real male, it will at best remain undecidable—in
Gedel’s sense—if he has “really” changed or if he is only trying particularly hard
to please her. Other messages belonging to this category are “You ought to love
me,” “Don’t be so obedient” and any other conceivable variation of the theme “Be
spontaneous.” It should also be realized that these paradoxical situations are not
usually expressed in words. Or we can communicate “be spontaneous” in a variety
of ways including non-verbal ones. We have all met individuals who ruin a party
by insisting through their forced gaiety that everyone ought to have fun.
There exists a simple mechanical model which incorporates the essence of a
paradox, namely the electric buzzer. As is known, the buzzer is so constructed that
its circuit opens when it is closed and closes when opened. In other words, it gives
an oscillatory yes-no-yes-no response. But there is a significant difference between
the behavior of the buzzer and that of a human being when exposed to paradox. The
husband in our example will not begin to oscillate between dominant and obedient
behavior, but once the inescapable absurdity of his wife’s request dawns upon him
and he finds himself unable to make her see his untenable position, he may tear out
his hair, or react in some other highly irrational way. Worse still, he may withdraw
which only increases his wife’s behavior and starts a vicious cycle. If he is asked
what the problem is, he will state “I withdraw because she nags,” but her answer
will be: “I nag him because he withdraws,” and so on ad infinitum.

THE DOUBLE BIND

The imaginary secretary to whom we dictated the paradoxical sentence about

Chicago and threatened with dismissal if she could not, or refused to, write it,
and the husband confronted with the equally paradoxical demand by his wife, are
both caught in a specific untenable position. This position was defined by Bateson,
Jackson, Haley, and Weakland in 1956 and called a Double Bind. Briefly a Double
Bind is the following communicational context:
On Human Communication 63

1. Two or more persons are involved in an intense relationship, which has a

high degree of survival value. It is, therefore, vitally important for them to
discriminate messages accurately and to respond appropriately to them. Situ-
ations in which such intense relationships come about are infancy, infirmity,
material dependence, loyalty, social norms, captivity in the hands of a ruthless
power, etc.
2. Into this situation, paradox is introduced by a message which is so structured
that it contradicts itself at the meta-level.
3. As explained under 1 above, the participants cannot leave the field; they can-
not, therefore, not communicate, not even by silence, but on the other hand
they cannot meta-communicate about the level at which messages are to be
understood. The meaning of vital messages thus remains undecidable.

Our theory is that the incomprehensible speech of schizophrenics results from

their attempts to say something and not to say it at the same time—the only solution
left if they are to obey all the rules imposed by a double bind. For example, a young
schizophrenic woman bounced into the psychiatrist’s office for her first interview
and cheerfully announced: “My mother had to get married and now I’m here.” It took
weeks to elucidate some of the many meanings which she had condensed into this
statement at the same time that she had disqualified them by her display of apparent
humor and zestfulness. In point of fact she was feeling increasingly trapped in an
impossible situation and her opening gambit was supposed to inform the therapist that:

1. She was the result of an illegitimate pregnancy;

2. This fact had somehow caused her psychosis;
3. “Here” meant both the psychiatrist’s office and her presence on earth, and
thus implied that on the one hand mother had driven her crazy while on the
other hand she had to be eternally indebted to her mother who had sinned
and suffered to bring her into the world;
4. “Had to get married” referred to the shot-gun nature of the mother’s wed-
ding and could either mean that mother was not to be blamed because social
pressure had forced her into the marriage, or that mother resented the forced
nature of the situation and blamed the patient’s existence for it.

“Schizophrenese” is a language which leaves it up to the listener to take his choice

from among many possible meanings which are not only different from, but may
be even incompatible with one another. This being so, it becomes possible to deny
any or all aspects of a message. If pressed for an answer to what she had meant by
her remark, this patient could conceivably have said casually: “Oh, I don’t know;
I guess I must be crazy.” If asked for an elucidation of anyone aspect of it, she
could have answered: “Oh no, this is not at all what I meant . . .” But even though
condensed beyond immediate recognition, her statement is a cogent description
64 Watzlawick and Jackson

of the paradoxical situation she finds herself in, and the remark “I must be crazy”
would be quite appropriate in view of the amount of self deception necessary to
adapt herself to this paradoxical universe.
The following, more extensive example of schizophrenic communication is taken
from the recorded interview of a young man. He, too, is talking about his mother,
and we can again observe the same non-committal commitment which is so typical
of “schizophrenese.” In addition, the example is rich in symbolism and metaphor
which convey to it a near-poetic quality:

“How can you prove that you have two mothers, when you have the same color eye?
As that book is. Only prove that she’s supposed to have movement in her. ‘Cause of
what she caused, we’re condemning ourselves. You must realize that. Especially if
you’re on the wrong side. You must realize that men have actually gone and lived.
That there aren’t very many Chinese. You get a chance to walk—they’ll pull a war
whenever possible, and try and blame it onto the other group. If they ever pull you
off, they’ll try and blame you for everything that they can. And also change the color
of a man, if he turns around and gets killed when he causes a war.”

As it stands, this speech is very obscure. But armed with a knowledge of this
patient’s background and problems, Gregory Bateson attempted a “translation”
which yields significant insight into the paradox of his situation:

“I cannot say that my mother is guilty. After all, I am the same sort of person she is.
Or was my grandmother guilty? She had eyes as blue as that book there, and was the
same sort of person as my mother and I. I can say that she affected me because she
made me crazy (by her love). But if I say that, I thereby make myself unlovable. I
would only be condemning myself. Surely you can understand that. After all, you are
just like she was. Look, there are people who really live (not like me and my mother).
Not everybody lives with a wall between him and life. But whenever I get a chance
to live, the quarreling starts. My parents blame me for it, just as everybody always
blames the other side. And if they succeed in preventing me from living, they will
always turn on me and blame me for everything or, like you, they will try to change
what sort of man I am. If I should turn and try to live and get beaten down, my trying
to live would cause a war.”

Again, it becomes clear that the patient’s statement is highly meaningful and
portrays his dilemma, but that it is also so carefully “coded” that an understand-
ing is almost impossible. By this we do not mean to imply that the patient is
doing all this “on purpose.” More than anybody else, he himself suffers from
his own confusion, and the need for self-deception. And just as one lie is likely
to require more and more lies to support itself, self-deceptions or mispercep-
tions have a similar tendency to increase and spread over ever larger areas of an
individual’s world. To a fictitious person caught in this dilemma, the following
limerick could be dedicated:
On Human Communication 65

There was a young man named Caruther

Who made a “decision for Mother”;
The error, though slight,
Caused an odious plight—
One misperception leads to another.

There is, however, one point that even in a very summary explanation of the
double bind concept must be made quite clear. From the above the reader may get
the impression that in a double bind there is always a binder and a victim. But,
needless to say, all relationship patterns are by their very nature mutual. It is usu-
ally quite impossible to trace the originator of the first move which leads to this
paradoxical impasse in a relationship. All that can be said is that once this pattern
has been established it binds all participants; there are no villains and no victims.

THE IMPORTANCE OF PARADOX

As we have stated, a paradox is a message having at least two levels one of which
is in conflict with the other (“don’t be so obedient”).
Why the mind should be so vulnerable to the effects of paradox is still very
unclear. It may have to do with the fact that brain cells, like all other neurons, are
capable of only two responses: to fire or to remain inactive. This means that they
can respond “yes” or “no” to given nervous input, but seem, by their very nature,
incapable of reacting adequately to a “yes and no” input. This hypothesis is un-
satisfactory for a number of reasons, the most important of which is perhaps the
undeniable fact that not only schizophrenia, the most frequent form of insanity,
but also the noblest pursuits of the mind are intimately linked to paradox. Fantasy,
play, humor, love, artistic creativity and religious experience would be impossible
without man’s ability to experience paradox.
Neurophysiologists may discover combinations of digital and analogic neural
systems that may throw light on the problem of paradox.
Tai-hui, a Zen master of the 12th century, used to carry a short bamboo stick
which he held forth before an assembly of monks, and said: “If you call this a
stick, you affirm; if you call it not a stick, you negate. Beyond affirmation and
negation what would you call it?” This is a typical Zen-buddhistic “koan,” de-
signed to create a psychological impasse through which the mind is to obtain
enlightenment. That is the difference between this paradox imposed by the master
on the pupil, and the paradox which leaves “crazy” behavior as the only possible
reaction as in the family double bind situation. Clearly, one man’s meat is here
another man’s poison.
Hippocrates’ sophism similia similibu curantur—likes are cured by likes—
besides being the basis for homeopathy, is in a curious way the basis of psycho-
therapy. Regardless of the theory behind any given technique of psychotherapeutic
66 Watzlawick and Jackson

intervention, the treatment situation is rich in communicational paradox and these

paradoxes are used to correct the paradoxes the patient brings with him.
That paradox is of importance in the psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic
situation seems odd because these situations are usually seen as the therapist
helping the patient achieve reality by listening to what the patient’s unconscious
is saying. Those interested in communication think that the psychotherapeutic
situation is a little more complicated than this. For example, when two adults
meet, they exchange information with each other either deliberately or unwit-
tingly. In the psychoanalytic situation, especially, such sharing is kept to a
minimum. Similarly, adults attempt to phrase what they say in a reasonably
logical and consistent manner so that the other individual can follow the mean-
ing that they are attempting to convey. In the analytic situation the patient is
asked to follow the fundamental rule of saying what comes into his head, no
matter how silly it may seem to him and no matter how lacking in context; that
is, the patient is taught to omit those verbal cues that would acquaint himself
and his hearer with the setting (in time, in place, et cetera) of his remarks. In
ordinary adult conversation, either member may comment on the manner and
behavior of the other and his comments are accepted if they are not considered
rude. In the analytic situation, only comments about the patient are permitted;
comments on the analyst are turned aside or subjected to interpretation and so
are not accepted at face value in the usual adult fashion. In addition, the ana-
lytic patient must respond to a regularity of time and duration of visits, more
reminiscent of his school days than adult social intercourse. Furthermore, he
must pay a fee for the company of the analyst and carry on his conversation
while he is recumbent and the analyst is not. Finally, the patient is expected
to express himself freely and spontaneously to a man who shows the utmost
of reserve and inscrutability. In such a situation, the patient cannot possibly
manifest the more easy exchange of adult conversation and is forced to attempt
an interchange more reminiscent of earlier learned tactics when he was small
and others were very large. In fact, to respond in a rational and mature way, the
analytic patient would have to refuse to follow the analyst’s directions to lie
down and free-associate. Indeed, should the patient behave in an adult way, it
could be said that the treatment was going badly; for example, the concept of
resistance is employed when the patient does not follow the analyst’s directions.
What has been said about psychoanalysis applies to nearly the same extent to
most dynamic psychotherapy. In any case, viewing the psychotherapeutic or
analytic situation as an interchange between two people provides an opportunity
for an explanation of the patient’s behavior which is rather different from the
usual one. One can recognize that a therapy designed to increase the patient’s
maturity forces him to be more mature by creating a regressive situation. The
most striking paradoxes, perhaps, in the analytic situation come about because
the patient comes to an expert who will help him by taking charge and tell him
On Human Communication 67

what to do with his problems as experts are supposed to do. The analyst responds
to the situation by putting the patient in charge. He clearly indicates that the patient
must do the work and that he is merely a kind of psychological midwife, assisting
natural forces. However, while indicating that he will not tell the patient what to
do and at the same time that he puts the patient in charge, the analyst takes charge
by directing the patient to lie down, to free-associate, to arrive at a certain time
on certain days, to pay a certain fee, and he will not let the patient direct him, and
may even be silent if the patient demands that he talk. Therefore, in a non-directive
setting at one level, the analyst at another level directs the crucial behavior in the
situation; namely, who is to speak, what is to be said, and how it is to be said. A
further paradox resides in the very tricky question of whether the analytic relation-
ship is a compulsory or a voluntary one. Often, a patient is excessively concerned
in his own personal life with a question of whether his intimates associate with
him because they want to or because they must, just as he is uncertain whether he
is with them because he is ill or because he wishes to be. In analysis, the patient
is told that his relationship is voluntary and his improvement depends upon his
willingness to cooperate and to attend sessions. Yet if the patient is late or misses a
session, the analyst objects and so indicates that the relationship is compulsory. The
patient talks to a man who is hired to talk to him, while within that framework the
analyst indicates that analysis offers an opportunity for a deep relationship and this
concept is reinforced by transference interpretations which imply that the patient
is being markedly influenced and controlled by the analyst.
The presence of paradoxes in the treatment situation is in no way a criticism
of psychoanalysis or psychotherapy they are undoubtedly crucial to the force of
therapy just as they play vital roles in certain other kinds of human experience.

CONCLUSION

This article has dealt mainly with pathologies of human communication. This is
deliberate because here one can see in bold relief the complexities that occur in
ordinary human exchange. Additionally, if we can better understand how people,
and eventually nations, drive each other crazy, there may be clues how to treat and
prevent such pathologies.
The ordinary citizen bears the complexities of communication much like he bears
the burden of the bomb—in a waiting unawareness. He is bombarded by tricky
messages from advertisers but rarely experiences and reacts to the distortions.
Only in considering special states like insanity, insobriety, and first love is he apt
to be intrigued or amused by the enormous complexities involved communicating
with another.
Perhaps this bit of Zen will convey to some of you the spirit of our interest in
communication:
68 Watzlawick and Jackson

To think
that I am not going to think of you any more
is still thinking of you.
Let me then try
not to think
that I am not going to think of you

SUGGESTED READING

Asch, Solomon E. (1955). Opinions and Social Pressure, Scientific American, 193, 31–35,
November.
Bateson, Gregory, Jackson, Don D., Haley, Jay, & Weakland, John, (1956). Toward a Theory
of Schizophrenia, Behavioral Science, 1(2), 251–264.
Hora, Thomas, (1959). Tao, Zen and Existential Psychotherapy, Psychologia, 2, 236–242.
Watzlawick, Paul, (1964) An Anthology of Human Communication; Syllabus and Tape. Palo
Alto, CA: Science and Behavior Press.