17 Facts About Paul Watzlawick

Paul Watzlawick was an Austrian-American family therapist, psychologist, communication theorist, and philosopher.

Paul Watzlawick was one of the most influential figures at the Mental Research Institute and lived and worked in Palo Alto, California.

Paul Watzlawick was born in Villach, Austria in 1921, the son of a bank director.

Paul Watzlawick then studied at the Carl Jung Institute in Zurich, where he received a degree in analytical psychology in 1954.

At the Mental Research Institute Paul Watzlawick followed in the footsteps of Gregory Bateson and the research team responsible for introducing what became known as the "double bind" theory of schizophrenia.

Paul Watzlawick was active in the field of family therapy.

Paul Watzlawick was one of the three founding members of the Brief Therapy Center at MRI.

Paul Watzlawick was licensed as a psychologist in California from 1969 to 1998, when he stopped seeing patients.

Paul Watzlawick was married and had two stepdaughters.

Paul Watzlawick did extensive research on how communication is effected within families.

Paul Watzlawick defines five basic axioms in his theory on communication, popularly known as the "Interactional View".

Paul Watzlawick considered five axioms as a prerequisite for functioning communication process and competence between two individuals or an entire family.

Paul Watzlawick studied "Normal" as well as the "disturbed" family in order to infer conditions conducive to the approach of interaction-orientation.

Paul Watzlawick believed that individual personality, character, and deviance are shaped by the individual's relations with his fellows.

Paul Watzlawick saw symptoms, defenses, character structure and personality as terms describing the individual's typical interactions, which occur in response to a particular interpersonal context.

Paul Watzlawick wrote 22 books that were translated into 80 languages for academic and general audiences with more than 150 scientific articles and book chapters.

Paul Watzlawick theory had great impact on the creation of the four-sides model by Friedemann Schulz von Thun.