Les cheveux du Baron de Munchhausen

by Paul Watzlawick

Les Cheveux du baron de Münchhausen Le baron de Münchhausen, d’après la légende, se prit lui-même par les cheveux pour se sauver, ainsi que son cheval, de la noyade. Est-il possible, à son exemple, de se tirer ou de tirer quelqu’un d’autre de quelque intenable situation en voyant la vie avec des yeux nouveaux ? Telle est la question à laquelle Paul Watzlawick veut répondre dans ce livre, clair et attrayant. Il nous montre comment nous pouvons changer notre perspective sur la réalité au lieu de nous enfermer dans une vision limitée et rigide ; il pose les bases d’une science paradoxale du changement, et décrit de façon minutieuse et fouillée le modèle théorique qui sous-tend la pratique de l’Institut de Palo Alto. Paul Watzlawick (1921-2007) Psychothérapeute et théoricien de la communication, il fut l’une des figures majeures de l’école de Palo Alto. Traduit de l’allemand par Anne-Lise Hacker et Martin Baltzer

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction

288 pages, Pocket Book

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Was an Austrian-American psychologist and philosopher. A theoretician in communication theory and radical constructivism, he has commented in the fields of family therapy and general psychotherapy. He was one of the most influential figures at the Mental Research Institute and lived and worked in Palo Alto, California, until his death at the age of 85

Reviews

[Jan Rice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bible cracking is an old tradition of opening the bible at random to find the answer to a question or solution to a problem. What is it, then, when one pulls a book off the shelf and starts to read it, a book that's lingered there over 20 years?

The stimulus was "Munchausen Syndrome," the subject of a friend's recent review. I remembered that years ago I had acquired a book I thought had to do with Munchausen Syndrome because of its name, and when it didn't I lost interest. For no clear reason and in a spirit of curiosity I read it now.

For the first little while I was reading along with a ho-hum attitude, until I came upon something called Newcomb's Paradox. Imagine you're in communication with an imaginary Being who from past experience can predict human choices with nearly total accuracy. The Being now gives you two choices. Box 1 contains $1000, and Box 2 contains either nothing or $1 million. The Being has arranged two outcomes. You can take what's in both boxes or only Box 2. If you decide to take only Box 2. the Being (predicting your decision) goes ahead and puts $1 million in it, but if you decide to take both boxes, the Being (predicting that) leaves Box 2 empty. You understand the conditions, the Being knows you do, you know the Being knows... Which choice do you make, and why?

The paradox is that either of the two decisions, taking only Box 2, or taking both boxes, can be plausibly justified. It seems one explanation is based on the immutable and timeless logical meaning of if-then. Contrast that with its other meaning, that is, the causal temporal meaning of if-then. In the latter case the Being has already made its prediction so that the $1 million is there--or not--without your subsequent decision having any sort of time-travel influence on the prior placement of the money.

That, it seems, conforms to the free will vs. determinism question.

From there we move to the following alternatives about reality: There is no order to reality, only chaos and confusion. We relieve our existential state by inventing an order to make sense of things and call that "reality." Or, there is an order, created by some higher being and independent of ourselves.

From there we launch into an extended description of the book Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, first published in 1884. What happens when a two-dimensional world is visited by a three-dimensional figure, etcetera.


The author said this woodblock print is either medieval or apocryphal. In the book it's untitled--but I call it "The Breakthrough."

Paul Watzlawick is a constructivist. In the field of psychology that means he was allied with the systems therapists. Unlike Freudians who believed something in the past causes problems in the present, he thought some pretend reality in the family--or other system--was causing the problems. Hence, therapeutic paradoxical interventions. A mother thinks her young adult son's schizophrenic behavior is incomprehensible. He wants enough of an allowance to buy a car, but she won't throw away money on him. The therapist prescribes schizophrenic behavior for the son as a form of protest. Thus the son takes responsibility for what he was doing, as the therapist reads it, anyway. This messes with the mother's head. Now she doesn't know whether he's really crazy or instrumentally protesting her refusal to let him handle some of his own disability money. She eventually gives him some of it; he saves it, gets a car, and eventually does establish greater independence, breaking the vicious circle.

Now we go way beyond therapy. In fact, we don't spend much time here at all on therapy. If you want more amazing stories of paradoxical therapy, the likes of which couldn't be done in today's cautious, "reality"-oriented world with its insurance strictures, check out Uncommon Therapy: The Psychiatric Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, M.D..

The author complains that philosophy and science have long ago given up the concept of an absolute independent reality, and that only psychiatry demands "reality adaptation" and insists on normality.

In a 1973 experiment a researcher had eight collaborators voluntarily check themselves into psychiatric wards claiming to hear voices etc. Upon admission the collaborators then reported the voices had stopped, and adopted their normal, everyday behavior. They were kept seven to 52 days, and all of them were discharged with the diagnosis "schizophrenia in remission." None of them were recognized as pretending. Instead, their diagnoses, rather than the objective fact of their behavior, created a "reality" that required and justified their treatment--and the only people who recognized they were notschizophrenic were a few of the other patients.

"If the facts do not agree with the theory, so much worse for the facts." --quoted from Hegel

Ideologies, political or religious, that claim to point to "the truth," can't explain themselves. They are hoist on their petard.

From unhealthy family, medical and corporate environments we take on revolution and totalitarianism. To rescue all the oppressed we must respect the needs of everybody--which then justifies the most extreme violence. The perfect as the enemy of the good. No heresy allowed.

The idealist with disgust for any compromise is "Miss Integrity." Those who won't go along must be eliminated. Or at least treated, for what is their refusal but more difficulty in adapting?

Yet change and evolution emanate from the imperfect, exactly what totalitarian systems suppress.

The years of Paul Watzlawick's life overlapped my father's, give or take a year or two. He--not my father--was born in Austria in 1921, completed high school in 1939, his doctorate in philosophy in Venice in '49, and he then studied psychology in Zurich, before emigrating from Europe to El Salvador and eventually Palo Alto, California. I don't know what he did during the war. There was no anti-Judaism in this book.

Munchhausen's Pigtail was published in 1990, 25 years ago, at which time the author was the age that I am now. Through the magic of books, time travel did occur, and we engaged in a conversation. He did come from another era. OK, so back then we did have R. D. Laing, blow-out centers, and all that, but today we have gone to the opposite extreme; psychiatrists and mental health professionals worship at the alter of "reality." They don't make them like him anymore.

[gallizio · Rating 5 out of 5]

L’enigma non esiste

[Alejandro Ramirez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uno de los libros más útiles que he leído últimamente. Por principio de cuentas, me llevó (indirectamente) a descubrir que existe una ciencia llamada cognitive science. Elegido más o menos al azar en una librería de Barcelona, este libro captura muy claramente la solución a temas como el libre albedrío, y la distinción entre lo que es realidad y lo que o lo es. Demasiados conceptos interesantes, pondré la reseña en la sección Cognitive Science.