Paul Watzlawick: MRI's mentors (Bateson, Jackson, Erickson, von Foerster)
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- čas přidán 1. 07. 2024
- Paul Watzlawick speaks about the Mental Research Institute (Palo Alto) and the four people he considers their mentors: Gregory Bateson, Don D Jackson, Milton H Erickson and Heinz von Foerster.
This was an after-lunch presentation at the joint MRI/BFTC conference The Global Reach of Brief Therapy, 26-27 August 1994 at Sunny Vale CA, USA. This half hour talk is interesting and valuable, not least because Watzlawick was intimately involved in these developments himself and therefore brings a personal connection. The audience was just finishing lunch as he rose to speak, which explains Watzlawick's opening remarks about "a pleasant metabolism"!
Thank you for the upload! :) a recording from watzlawick I didn't know :)
If you have any more, they are warmly welcomed!
Thank you for this wonderful audio recording
Thanks for sharing this !
Thanks again Mark
very interesting
Bateson received a grant to study the paradoxes of communication not the pragmatics of communication. This is not a trivial distinction. Bateson objected to the book 'Pragmatics of Communication' by Watzlawick et al because he was opposed to having his ideas as represented as being about the consciously deliberate manipulation of human beings even if done for therapeutic reasons. Bateson believed that the attempt by the conscious mind of the therapist to manipulate the spontaneous unconscious process of patient/s would in the long run be pathogenic if not in the short run. He believed the pragmatic approach to be based on what he thought of as bad epistemology i.e short term success through manipulating clients which only reinforced the pathogenic notions of power and control in relationships. Bateson preferred to be more non directive in his approach. This may have been for the reason that he was surprised that a Jungian trained analyst, who should have been aware that the conscious mind can never fully capture the full meaning of unconscious processes, would even ask such a question.
Bateson and Watzlawick, like Hayley, Munichin and all systems focused clinicians and researchers dismissed the notion of unconscious as unscientific and useless. So your remark makes no sense. Besides Watzlawick never spoke about manipulation, but about working with the pragmatic of human communication with directiveness and purpose.
Where did Bateson dismiss the concept of the unconscious as unscientific ?.
Stuart Schneiderman that’s inherent in the entire systems theory and it’s clinical practice, which he largely co-created with Jackson, Hayley and watzlawick from the core cybernetics ideas at Palo Alto. The entire psychoanalytic school is largely dismissed by them all, however Bateson and Watzlawick were more wider focused, its Hayley and Jackson that really applied this to clinical work and psychotherapy. Systems theory was at its time a radical revolution in psychological treatment and early on went slightly overboard in its critique of psychoanalytical methods and ideas, but boy are their writings from that time hilariously amusing, irreverent and rich. But I don’t have any specific reference of the top of my head.
@@korpiz In 'Steps to an Ecology of Mind' Bateson writes about unconscious processes in relation to art, consciousness,deuterro learning, the impossibility of translation from unconscious mentation to that of conscious thought, non verbal communication and unconscious habits of perception. On pages 108 to 110 of the Paladin edition he makes his position on the Freudian Unconscious very clear as well as his commitment to the centrality of the notion of the unconscious mind and primary process mentation.
Stuart Schneiderman he speaks about it, and as far as I remember makes some links to the Freudian concept, but also differences, he uses some of the vocabulary of unconscious but writes about rules of the system/relationships for thinking, feeling, acting that is not within the conscious mind as those are between people. This is not the same, it’s actually the opposite of the Freudian concept, and it’s the focus for the pragmatics of clinical work. The unprovable and inferred structure from Freud about the horizontal hierarchy with all its language of depth, was replaced by a vertical theory of the mind, one of the two brain hemispheres and their integration and differential development and art, dreams, creativity and aesthetics as the domain of the right hemisphere and access to those (analogic communication) about integration not about “going deep”. But in saying that I have read much more of watzlawick and Haley than of Bateson, and you have peeked my curiosity and I shall go deeper into his writings that I have done so far think. I have read Bateson and Haley had a big disagreement, but not sure what it was about, maybe it was connected to what you first wrote.