Published: October 2024

Keywords:
Luca Casadio, Paul Watzlawick, Mental Research Institute, Palo Alto, Gregory Bateson, Dounle Bind, Towards a theory for schizophrenia, Change, The Language of Change, Pragmatics of Human Communication, Paradox, The Reality of Reality, Invented Reality, Baron Munchausen's Ponytail, Brief Strategic Therapy, Systemics, Systemicists, Strategic, Control, Psychoanalysis, Mara Selvini Palazzoli, Luigi Boscolo, Paolo Bertrando, Techniques, Therapeutic Manipulation, Prescriptions, Corrective Emotional Experience

Luca Casadio

Luca Casadio, psychologist and psychotherapist, worked as a managing psychologist for the USL. He teaches in several graduate schools and has published some books and numerous articles. Including: "Sistemica: voices and paths in complexity", with Umberta Telfener and the supervision of Heinz von Foerster, Bollati Boringhieri, 2003, "Between Bateson and Bion, at the roots of relational thinking", Antigone editions, 2010. Regarding the relationship between art and psychology has published: "The images of the mind: for a psychoanalysis of cinema, art and literature" Franco Angeli, 2004, and "The art of psychotherapy and the psychology of art", Mimesis, 2015.

Abstract

This article intends to propose a total evaluation of the ideas and work of Paul Watzlawick, one of the leading creators of the Mental Research Institute (MRI) of Palo Alto – a centre that has contributed and elaborated the first systemic techniques for individual care as well as the family care. The object of this article is to see a truly great scientist with a general and demystifying view through time. Even if the systemic metaphor now appears to be at its sunset, it continues to affect in the same way the ideas and practices of various scientists and practitioners who even today call themselves "systemicists". So, the evaluation of Paul Watzlawick's ideas will allow us to gather the roots of this thought and the heritage that is still in action even today.