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Fam Proc 21:401-403, 1982

Hermetic Pragmaesthetics or Unkempt Thoughts About an Issue of

Family Process
PAUL WATZLAWICK, PH.D.a
aResearch Associate, Mental Research Institute, 555 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto, California 94301.

... For Beauty's nothing but the beginning of Terror we are still just able to bear, and we adore it so because it serenely
disdains to destroy us.
Rilke
Duino Elegies
Anthropology is not my field, but I do remember reading Malinowski and other experts explain how beautifully natural
systems remain in harmony with nature as long as they stay uncontaminated by the pale cast of thought, how being deeply
embedded in this natural harmony has an ennobling effect on the human spirit, immunizing it against selfishness, lust for
power, and other ugly propensities. I was touched by the story of the old Eskimo woman who, upon realizing that her
failing health had turned her into a useless mouth to feed, would say goodbye forever to her haft-starved clan. In my mind's
eye I saw this frail, noble creature stumble away from the igloos, disappearing into the whiteness, watched by her family
members with (presumably frozen) tears on their ruddy cheeks. But was it not beautiful to think that even in her death this
woman contributed to the great order of things by becoming a none too appetizing breakfast for a hungry polar bear? Such
were the days of romantic anthropology!
Later I came across the same story in a somewhat different version. Here the old lady appeared decidedly uninspired by
any aesthetic considerations. She would fight tooth and nail against her eviction from the life-saving igloo, screaming,
holding onto the legs that tried to kick her out, and had probably to be subdued by a deft blow with a whale bone. And it
was at about this time that I also came across the above Rilke quotation...
Reading the introductory articles to the March 1982 of Family Processes, I thus have a weird déjà-vu experience. With
my original training as aJungian analyst, I was deeply committed to what my colleague John Weakland so aptly calls
romantic therapy. The goal of treatment was a fabulous merging of the Ego into the Self, called Individuationa goal that
admittedly could only be approximated but never reached in a single lifetime. So there really was no hurry. But my patients,
somewhat Like that blasted Eskimo woman, had very different priorities: headaches, anxieties, marital problemsand they
were not interested in the (for me) obvious fact that these were just surface manifestations of the darkly beautiful ways
toward Individuation. They, too, simply wanted to survive and get over their pain. Oh I know it was they who eventually
contributed to that massive reaction formation that led me toward pragmatics, away from "intuition and felt meaning" and
all that.
But never mind the trivial vicissitudes of my individuation. What, however, is most surprising about the
above-mentioned articles is that they nonchalantly turn the historical development upside down. On page 2, for instance,
Keeney and Sprenkle (3) depict the "more pragmatic" therapist as doing merely individual symptom removal, whereas the
"less pragmatic" and, therefore, presumably more aesthetic therapist "would be more concerned with evaluating the larger
gestalt of which that symptom is a part, be the gestalt an individual's psyche, pattern of social interaction, or family
ecology."1 But as early as 1962, Fry, then a member of the Bateson team, published his paper on "The Marital Context of
the Anxiety Syndrome" (2), in which he showed precisely that apparently "individual" symptoms can best be understood
and treated as interactional patterns. Fry's article was just one of many papers published during those years by members of
the Bateson group and of the MRI. Their common denominator was precisely the rejection of the linear, monadic,
intrapsychic model and its replacement by the interactional view. At that time, the term pragmatics was as yet unknown in
therapy and existed only in testbooks of semiotics. Thus, what is now called pragmatics originally came as the very
reaction to what the above-named authors now associate with the term and to which they juxtapose their term aesthetics.
Then there is the tiresome confusion between pragmatics and pragmatism. The mere fact that on superficial reading the
two words look alike does not give them the same meaning. Yet, "it would be foolish to sacrifice ... ideas on the altar of
pragmatism" [1, p.505], but pragmatics is precisely a realm of ideas about the supra-individual patterns and processes by
which "realities" are created that then can lead to complications of psychotic proportions. (Would this point be perhaps
more acceptable if we called that school of thought Pragmaesthetics? It would have the advantage of being a more difficult
term, clearly conveying the idea that the subject matter is complicated and esoteric. For, as Karl Popper is supposed to have
once said, nothing is less acceptable than simple answers to deep problems.)

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One wonders what is "the pragmatic error," and one is told that it is the blindness to patterns of connections revealed
through metaphor, that it is reductionism, that it is based on a confusion between the literal and the metaphorical and that it
is blind to the difference between analogical and digital forms of communication. As the principal author of Pragmatics of
Human Communication, I have yet to meet a "pragmatic" therapist of that kind. And a-propos of that book, if I felt at
liberty to do so, I could quote from the correspondence between Gregory Bateson and us authors prior to its publication. It
would show that the suggestion to call it The Aesthetics of Human Communication and the claim that this suggestion "fell
on deaf ears" are examples of Soviet-type historiography. (Or shall we, metaphorically, call it hagiography?)
Would even an "aesthetic" therapist go so far as to deny that so-called patients come to him for help? And if they come
for that reason and purpose, how can one then best blind onself to the fact that all help is manipulation and thus exercise of
poweradmittedly of power given by them to him, but still power? And that they quite rightly expect to be influenced,
rather than given insight into the aesthetic qualities of their delusions or ulcers?
Then there is the controversy about where to draw a system's limits, a controversy older than systems theory itself. If he
were to take a totally logical, consequential point of view, the reductionistic, intrapsychic therapist (or resealcher) would of
necessity have to arrive at Adam and Eve, the system's thinker in planetary spacewhich is what some starry-eyed guru
types seriously suggest.
And, finally, what about all that beauty? Is it not of general knowledge that the great harmony of nature is among many
other things also the result of the untold suffering of countless individuals and the indifferent destruction of entire species if
and when they fail to keep up with the unpredictability of ecosystemic changes? Is that terror part of aesthetics? If so, then
either mankind was wrong all along when it tried to protect itselfor we are back to Rilke and the Eskimo woman.

REFERENCES
1. Bateson, G., Steps to an Ecology of Mind, New York, Ballantine Books, 1972.
2. Fry, W. F., "The Marital Context of the Anxiety Syndrome," Fam. Proc., 1, 245-252, 1962.
3. Keeney, B. P. and Sprenkle, D. H., "Ecosystemic Epistemology: Critical Implications for the Aesthetics and
Pragmatics of Family Therapy," Fam. Proc., 21, 1-19, 1982.

1This one reference, by the way, is one of the very few practical hints at what aesthetic therapy is con-cretely all about that can

be found in that entire issue of Family Process.