Paul Watzlawick PhD (born Villach, Austria) is one of the world's leading theoreticians in Communication Theory and Radical Constructivism and very important inspiration in the field of family therapy and general psychotherapy. He is living and working in California.

Life
After he graduated from high school in 1939 in Villach, Paul Watzlawick studied psychology and philology at the University of Venice and graduated in 1949. He then worked at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, where he received an additional diploma in 1954. In 1957 he continued his researching career at the University of El Salvador.

In 1960, Don. D. Jackson arranged for him to come to Palo Alto to do research at the Mental Research Institute of Palo Alto. Beginning in 1967 he has taught psychiatry at Stanford University. As of 2005 Watzlawick is still living and working in California.

Work
In Palo Alto, Watzlawick and his colleagues (most notably Gregory Bateson) developed the Double Bind theory. Other scientific contributions include works on radical constructivism and most importantly his theory on communication. Both he and Gregory Bateson have been a very important inspiration in the field of family therapy.

He defines 5 basic axioms in his theory on communication that are necessary to have a functioning communication between two individuals. If one of these axioms is somehow disturbed, communication might fail.

1. One Cannot Not Communicate (Man kann nicht nicht kommunizieren): Every behaviour is a kind of communication. Because behaviour does not have a counterpart (there is no anti-behaviour), it is not possible not to communicate.
2. Every communication has a content and relationship aspect such that the latter classifies the former and is therefore a metacommunication.: This means that all communication includes, apart from the plain meaning of words, more information - information on how the talker wants to be understood and how he himself sees his relation to the receiver of information.
3. The nature of a relationship is dependent on the punctuation of the partners communication procedures: Both the talker and the receiver of information structure the communication flow differently and therefore interpret their own behaviour during communicating as merely a reaction on the other's behaviour (i.e. every partner thinks the other one is the cause of a specific behaviour). Human communication cannot be desolved into plain causation and reaction strings, communication rather appears to be cyclic.
4. Human communication involves both digital and analog modalities: Communication does not involve the merely spoken words (digital communication), but non-verbal and analog-verbal communication as well.
5. Inter-human communication procedures are either symmetric or complementary, depending on whether the relationship of the partners is based on differences or parity.

Watzlawick is author of 18 books (in 85 foreign language editions) and more than 150 book articles and book chapters. Books he has written or on which he has collaborated include

1. Pragmatics of Human Communication,
2. The Situation is Hopeless, but not Serious,
3. Ultra-Solutions: How to Fail Most Successfully,
4. How Real is Real?
5. "Change"
6. "The Language of Change"

Quotations

"It follows from the assumption of a universally valid ideology, just as night follows day, that other positions are heresy."

"As I have already said, the belief that one's own view of reality is the only reality is the most dangerous or all delusions. It becomes still more dangerous if it is coupled with the missionary zeal to enlighten the rest of the world, whether the rest of the world wishes to be enlightened or not. To refuse to embrace wholeheartedly a particular definition of reality (e.g. an ideology), to dare to see the world differently can become a "think crime" in a truly Orwellian sense as we get steadily closer to 1984."

"If we search our subjective experience in comparable situation, we find that we are likely to assume the actions of a secret "experimenter" behind the vicissitudes of our lives. The loss or the absence of a meaning in life is perhaps the most common denominator or all forms of emotional distress; it is especially the much-commented-on "modern" illness. Pain, disease, loss, failure, despair, disappointment, the fear of death, or merely boredom -- all lead to the feeling that life is meaningless. It seems to us that in its most basic definition, existential despair is the painful discrepancy between what is, and what should be, between one's perceptions and one's third-order premises."

"Man never ceases to seek knowledge about the objects of his experiences, to understand their meaning for his existence and to react to them according to his understanding. Finally, out of the sum total of the meanings that he has deduced from his contacts with numerous single objects of his environment there grows a unified view of the world into which he finds himself "thrown" (to use an existentialist term again) and this view is of the third order."

"If we have dwelled on Godel's work at some length, is it because we see it in the mathematical analogy of what we would call the the ultimate paradox of man's existence. Man is ultimately subject and object of his quest. While the question whether the mind can be considered to be anything like a formalized system, as defined in the preceding paragraph, is probably unanswerable, his quest for an understanding of the meaning of his existence is an attempt at formalization."

"But the solution to the riddle of life and space and time lies outside space and time. For, as it should be abundantly clear by now, nothing inside a frame can state, or even ask, anything about that frame. The solution, then, is not the finding of an answer to the riddle of existence, but the realization that there is no riddle. This is the essence of the beautiful, almost Zen Buddhist closing sentences of the Tracticus:" "For an answer which cannot be expressed the question too cannot be expressed. The riddle does not exist..."