Paul Watzlawick, John H. Weakland, Richard Fisch Change
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Paul Watzlawick, John H. Weakland, Richard Fisch Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution To the memory of DON D. JACKSON FOREWORD I would have preferred to say much more about this book than I do here. Unfortunately, ill health prevents me from doing that, but thereby leads me to come to the point at once. There have been multitudes of books and theories on how to change people, but at long last, the authors in this book have looked seriously at the subject of change itself—both how change occurs spontaneously, and how change can be promoted. I have attempted to understand this in my own work, and describe it in my own writings. Psychotheraphy is sought not primarily for enlightenment about the unchangeable past but because of dis¬satisfaction with the present and a desire to better the future. In what direction and how much change is needed neither the pa¬tient nor the therapist can know. But a change in the current situation is required, and once established, however small, necessi¬tates other minor changes, and a snowballing effect of these minor changes leads to other more significant changes in accord with the patient's potentials. Whether the changes are evanescent, perma¬nent, or evolve into other changes is of vital importance in any understanding of human behavior for the self and others. I have viewed much of what I have done as expediting the currents of change already seething within the person and the family—but currents that need the “unexpected,” the “illogical,” and the “sudden” move to lead them into tangible fruition. It is this phenomenon of change with which this book is con¬cerned, the actual nature and kinds of change so long overlooked by the formulation of theories about how to change people. W'atz- lawick, Weakland, and Fisch have, in this extremely important book, looked at this phenomenon and put it into a conceptual framework—illuminated by examples from a variety of areas— which opens up new' pathways to the further understanding of how people become enmeshed in problems with each other, and new pathways to expediting the resolution of such human im¬passes. The relevance of this new framework extends far beyond the sphere of “psychological” problems from w'hich it grew. This work is fascinating. I think it is a noteworthy contribution—a damn good book—and a must for anyone seeking to understand the many aspects of group behavior. 1 am pleased that my own work has contributed to the ideas represented in this book, I appreciate having had the opportunity to make this small comment on it. Perhaps, here as elsewhere, such a small gesture is all the expediting one needs do. Milton H. Erickson, M.D. PREFACE Daring as it is to investigate the unknown, even more so it is to question the known. —KASPAR VHEN in 1334 the Duchess of Tyrol, Margareta Maultasch, encircled the castle of Hochosterwitz in the province of Carinthia, she knew only too well that the fortress, situated 011 an incredibly steep rock rising high above the valley floor, was impregnable to direct attack and would yield only to a long siege. In due course, the situation of the defenders became critical: they were down to their last ox and had only two bags of barley corn left. Margareta‟s situation was becoming equally pressing, albeit for different reasons: her troops were beginning to be unruly, there seemed to be no end to the siege in sight, and she had similarly urgent military business elsewhere. At this point the commandant of the castle decided on a desperate course of action which to his men must have seemed sheer folly: he had the last ox slaughtered, had its abdominal cavity filled with the remaining barley, and ordered the carcass thrown down the steep cliff onto a meadow in front of the enemy camp. Upon receiving this scornful message from above, the discouraged duchess abandoned the siege and moved on. A very different situation existed in May 1940 aboard a British trawler on its way to a secret meeting with a German intelligence officer, Major Ritter, south of the Dogger Bank in the English Channel. Aboard the ship were two “double cross” agents,1 code- named Snow and Biscuit respectively. Snow had done excellent work for British intelligence in the past and was considered by the Germans one of their star agents in Britain. Biscuit, a man w;ith a long criminal record, had turned into a very reliable police informer and was now to be introduced to Major Ritter as Snow‟s subagent, to be trained in Germany and then sent back to Eng¬land. For one reason or another, British intelligence considered it advisable that neither agent should know that the other was also working for the British side, but apparently both men eventually guessed this fact. This led to a nightmarish impasse which Mas- terman, in his fascinating book on the British double-cross system, describes as follows: On the way [to the rendezvous with Ritter], unfortunately, Biscuit formed the opinion from Snow's behavior and his conversation that he was acting genuinely in the interest of the Germans and would undoubt¬edly reveal his position as a controlled agent as soon as he rnet Major Ritter. Snow on the other hand appears to have been, for reasons which we cannot analyse, under the impression that Biscuit was a genuine German agent who would undoubtedly reveal his, Snow's, ambiguous position when their meeting with Ritter took place. As a result of this he did everything in his power to convince Biscuit that he was acting genuinely in the German interest, and thereby redoubled Biscuit‟s suspi¬cions (75). In this strange situation, then, both parties were trying very hard to do what under the circumstances seemed to be the best thing, but the harder they tried the more hopeless the situation became. Finally, in the interest of his own safety and to avoid what seemed to turn into a disaster for British intelligence, Biscuit ]This term refers either to enemy agents who are captured and “turned around** (i.e., forced to work for their captors), or to individuals who volunteer to infiltrate the enemy spy system and pose as their agents, while supplying them the right kind of wrong information, helping to uncover other enemy agents, etc. locked Snow into his cabin and returned the trawler to Grimsby without attempting to meet Ritter. Thus, in his sincere attempt to prevent ultimate failure, he produced it. These two examples illustrate the subject matter of this book. It deals with the age-old questions of persistence and change in human affairs. More particularly, it is concerned with how prob¬lems arise, and how they are perpetuated in some instances and resolved in others. Most of all, it examines how, paradoxically, common sense and “logical” behavior often fail, while actions as „„illogical” and “unreasonable” as those taken by the defenders of Hochosterwitz succeed in producing a desired change. On the one hand, although logic and common sense offer excellent solutions when they work, who has not had the frustrat¬ing experience of doing his very best in these terms, only to sec things going from bad to worse? On the other hand, every once in a while we experience some “illogical” and surprising but welcome change in a troublesome stalemate. Indeed, the theme of the puzzling, uncommonsensical solution is an archetypical one, reflected in folklore, fairy tales, humor, and many dreams— just as there are both popular and more erudite conceptions of the perversity of other people, the world, or the devil to explain the converse situation. Yet it seems that little serious and systematic inquiry has been focused on this whole matter, which has re¬mained as puzzling and contradictory as ever. We ourselves came to be concerned with this problem only indirectly, largely as an unanticipated consequence of our practice and study of psychotherapy, and much of our discussion and exemplification will relate to this field with which we are most closely acquainted. Though reached via that particular route, this is primarily a book about persistence and change—and about their role in problem formation and resolution—in human affairs quite generally. Since even our most general views relate to concrete experi¬ence, a few words about our professional background may be helpful. Like other therapists with orthodox training and many years of practical experience we found ourselves increasingly frus¬trated by the uncertainty of our methods, the length of treat¬ments, and the paucity of their results. At the same time, we were intrigued by the unexpected and unexplainable success of occa¬sional “gimmicky” interventions—probably more than anything else by the fact that they were not supposed to have any beneficial effect. In 1966, one of us, Richard Fisch, proposed the establish¬ment of what for lack of a better name we came to call the Brief Therapy Center of the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto. Under his direction we began to investigate the phenomena of human change, and in doing so we soon found that this required us to take a fresh look at just about everything that we had believed, learned, and practiced. Another unifying element was the fact that from the beginning we spoke the same “language”: as research associates of the Men¬tal Research Institute we all had several years of experience in human communication research and in interactional (i.e., couple and family) psychotherapy as it had been developed by what is loosely known as the Palo Alto Group under Gregory Bateson's theoretical and Don D.