The loss or the absence of meaning in life is perhaps the most common denominator of all forms of emotional distress; it is especially the much-commented-on “modern” illness.
The suicide arrives at the conclusion that what he is seeking does not exist; the seeker concludes that what he has not yet looked in the right place.
In other words, what is supposedly found is an invention whose inventor is unaware of his act of invention, who considers it as something that exists independently of him; the invention then becomes the basis of his world view and actions.
This is the secret of propaganda: To totally saturate the person, whom the propaganda wants to lay hold of, with the ideas of the propaganda, without him even noticing that he is being saturated.
You cannot not communicate.
Thus when an interpretation of the world, an ideology, for example, claims to explain everything, one thing remains inexplicable, namely, the interpretive system itself. And with that, every claim to completeness and finality fails.
Wer als Werkzeug nur einen Hammer hat, sieht in jedem Problem einen Nagel.
When Paul announced himself in a rather formal way to the secretary, he said simply, “I am Watzlawick.” She suspected he was a new psychiatric patient showing up for an appointment at the wrong time, and she interpreted his introduction as, “I am not Slavic.
Another property of a group is that one may combine its members in varying sequence, yet the outcome of the combination remains the same.
A population of four million is not quantitatively but qualitatively different from an individual, because it involves systems of interaction among the individuals.
Gear-shifting is thus a phenomenon of a higher logical type than giving gas, and it would be patently nonsensical to talk about the mechanics of complex gears in the language of the thermodynamics of fuel supply.
There is in the nature of human communication no way of making another person a participant in information or perception available exclusively to oneself.
Disagreement about how to punctuate the sequence of events is at the root of countless relationship struggles.
To avoid a frequent misunderstanding, it cannot be emphasized too strongly that symmetry and complementarity in communication are not ins and by themselves “good” or “bad”, “normal” or “abnormal”, etc. The two concepts simply refer tp two basic categories into which all communicational interchanges can be divided.
Man kann nicht nicht kommunizieren.
In psychotherapy it is the myth of knowing this why as precondition for change which defeats its own purpose.
In human relations, all prediction is connected in one way or another with the phenomenon of trust.
In fact, it seems that the more spontaneous and “healthy” a relationship, the more the relationship aspect of communication recedes into the background.
In psychotherapeutic work with intelligent schizophrenics on again and again is tempted to conclude that they would be much better off, much more “normal”, if they could only somehow blunt the acuity of their thinking and thus alleviate the paralyzing effect it has on their actions.
It is in the nature of paradox that “equations” based on it do not work out. Where paradox contaminates human relations, disease appears.