The fundamental principle that many psychotherapies such as RET, Gestalt therapy and even Rogerian therapy base their treatments on is that people learn how to feel unhappy and repeat these thoughts and behaviors throughout their lives - sometimes never learning from them - creating their own unhappiness by doing more of the same.
Dr. Watzlawick's book tells the reader in no uncertain terms to repeat his exercises to be unhappy. Some games such as "self-fulfilling prophecies" or "why would anybody love me?" seem absurd, but are useful for therapy acting as a "symptom prescription" to break an ingrained cycle of unhappiness in a patient.
In the closing pages, he references Dostoyevsky's The Possessed with this line:
"Everything is good...everything. Man is unhappy because he doesn't know he's unhappy. It's only that. That's all. That's all! If one finds out, one will become happy at once, that minute."
While happiness may be a spontaneous condition, it can be hampered by thinking that restricts such feelings from occurring. Watzlawick's wisdom is something everyone can take heed of.
4 comments:
Do you mean by this precis that the therapy is to repeat negative thoughts to oneself?
No. Its more of becoming aware of your bad habits by doing even more of the same. It's emphasizing the repetition of maladaptive behaviors more so than negative thoughts.
I have great respect for the late Paul Watzlawick, and this book and his other later publications are great reads, but I would recommend his co-authored work, The Pragmatics of Human Communication, which was required reading in Neil Postman's media ecology doctoral program, and a key text for the field of communication. I would also recommend another of his co-authored works, Change, which is on the bookshelves of many counselors and therapists. Those books provide more of a coherent explanation for the kinds of therapeutic interventions (he called it brief therapy) that you describe in this post.
Watzlawick followed the lead of Gregory Bateson and Norbert Wiener in adopting and adapting cybernetics and systems theory to human relations. Korzybski's work anticipated systems theory, and influenced it, and Gregory Bateson, who gave the Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture decades ago, was influenced by Korzybski, but also developed a relational approach that went into areas GS doesn't cover. Mary Catherine Bateson delivered the AKML last year, as you may know, and Deborah Tannen will be giving it on Oct. 29 in NYC, and her approach to language is both sympathetic to GS and very much in line with Bateson's perspective.
If you like Watzlawick, I would also recommend Kenneth Gergen, who participated in our last GS conference. Gergen followed up on Watzlawick's insights, his book The Saturated Self has been very popular in explaining the psychology of contemporary life and the postmodern condition, and last year he published a new book, Relational Being.
I read Pragmatics and Change as well as How do we know what we know? which I found very informative. I also read a book he co-authored with an Italian psychologist, the name of which escapes me at the minute.
I'll have to check out Gergen too :)
In a slightly unrelated note: I am doing my Master's short thesis using media ecology as an analytical tool. Apart from the obvious (Postman, McLuhan etc.) who else should I be looking at, in your opinion? My course barely covers media ecology, if at all (it hasn't to date in any meaningful fashion, anyhow.)
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