Writing With Paul

Although Pragmatics of Human Communicatiorz (Watzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson, 1967) was a turning point in both our careers, it began in an almost offhand way with a conversation between Paul Watzlawick and Don Jackson in about 1964. Paul and I had been meeting with Don, trying to figure out Don's amazing clinical intuitions. Don was a well-known psychiatrist, the founder and Director of the Mental Research Institute, where we were working. During one of these meetings, he and Paul began to discuss a different topic, which was the possibility of a book that brought together some of the rich flow of ideas that the Palo Alto Group was producing and publishing. In a little over l0 years since the seminal double-bind paper (Bateson, Jackson, Haley, & Weakland, 1956), a selection of their reprinted publications had already filled two volumes (Jackson, 1968a, 1968b). We began to take the idea of a book seriously, and soon Paul and I were meeting regularly to talk about a book. He was a research associate and psychotherapist with a PhD and I was Don's research assistant and staff writer, with an undergraduate degree in psychology. As most of us know, there is a big distance between saying "we should write a book about that" and deciding more specifically what "that" is, much less actually writing it. In this case, there was such a wide range of topics to choose from. The ideas that were potentially available from our prolific group went in many directions: family therapy, the beginnings of brief therapy, and the possibility of a different approach to communication than the dominant information-transmission model (Shannon & Weaver, 1949). No single book could cover it all. However, Paul and I shared an intense interest in an alternative theory of communication, which was the direction we chose to pursue. Within the topic of communication, our interests were both overlapping and complementary in a fortunate way. He was, and remained, brilliant and articulate about theory and abstraction. For example, a well-read multivolume historical collection of work in mathematics was always on his desk at the time (and its influence is obvious in Pragmatics). But he was also an insightful observer, able to notice key examples of phenomena in therapy sessions, in everyday life, and even in movies and plays. (We once talked about writing a book on relationships as portrayed in the wonderful "foreign films" that were coming to North America in the 1960s; I am glad we did Pragmancs instead.) My interests were always more academic than clinical, but, like Paul, I was especially captivated by observation, by closely analysing actual interactions and building theory from them. It seemed perfectly natural-though in retrospect highly presumptuous-that we should set out to write a book proposing a new theory of communication, illustrated with examples from anywhere and everywhere. So we decided on an ambitious plan that corresponded to the eventual chapters of Pragmatics. It is important to emphasize that, as the citations in the book show, the ideas we chose to cover were not just our own but usually drawn from the work of many others in the group. In organizing and synthesizing them, we inevitably focused on what interested us, often changing them as we sought to bring them together into a coherent version of our own. Integration is always a transforming and creative act. The guiding principle was one that Paul and I still talked about in our last conversation, 40 years later, with as much intellectual passion as before: the necessity to see beyond and outside individuals and to focus on their interactions, that is, on communicative rather than mental phenomena.