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Paul Watzliwak, noted author and psychologist, and died on March 31, 2007 in Palo Alto, California.  He was 85 years old, and he had recently retired from the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto where he had been a mainstay of their faculty since 1960. Click the title above to read more about his life and contributions to analytical psychology.
Paul Watzliwak, noted author and psychologist, and died on March 31, 2007 in Palo Alto, California.  He was 85 years old, and he had recently retired from the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto where he had been a mainstay of their faculty since 1960.

Watzliwak was an internationally known expert in communications theory, family systems and family psychotherapy, and the author of 18 books and over 150 articles which had been translated into 80 languages.  His work with Gregory Bateson, Don Jackson, and John Weakland in the double bind theory of schizophrenia has long been recognized as a classic in the field.  His book "Pragmatics of Communication" was a bestseller in Europe, and he lectured widely all over the world.

Perhaps what is not so well known is that Watzliwak originally trained at the Jung Institute in Zürich, graduating from there in 1954.  Paul was born and raised in Villach, Austria, and he received his Ph.D. in philology from Venice in 1949.  Paul spoke five languages fluently.  After receiving his Ph.D. he became a student at the Jung Institute in Zürich in the very early days when there were few students.  He did part of his Jungian training in Rome where he was in analysis with  Ernst Bernhard, which counted towards his Diploma Training at the Institute.

After receiving his diploma from the Jung Institute Paul taught for one year in India and another year in El Salvador.  In 1958 at the first IAAP Congress in Zürich John Rosen, the author of " Direct Analysis", was an invited speaker to the Congress.  Paul went to work with Rosen in Philadelphia in 1958 and then moved to the Mental Research Institute where he spent the remainder of his professional life.  He he was a teacher in the department of psychiatry at Stanford and a frequent lecturer besides the author of the above-mentioned books.

One important contribution to English-speaking Jungians was his translation of the only paper which Toni Wolff wrote entitled, "Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche".  This was an important paper in the early training of Jungian analysts.  Although Paul disavowed all his earlier Jungian training, he remained a member of the IAAP for many years, Jim Hillman had him lecture at the Jung Institute in Zürich during the early 1960s, and he spent roughly a decade of his professional life as a Jungian.

Thomas B. Kirsch, M.D.