In the 1990s, psychologist Paul Watzlawick was conducting a training seminar when he made the following controversial remarks:
We can no longer go on saying here is one person who is the cause of all trouble. His ignorance or his inability to go along with people or whatever—his shortcomings are responsible for the secondary effects that we experience throughout the system. [We’ve] begun to realise that systems have their own . . . what? Individuality, if you will. Certainly, they have their own pathologies and that they can be understood the moment you give up the idea on which classical science was based until about the time of World War II, i.e., that the causality underlying phenomena, be they in nature or elsewhere—in the social field, for instance—is a linear causality. That the occurrence of Event A—everything is remaining equal, of course—invariably, always, inevitably, deterministically, produces Event B. That’s it. Therefore—well rather—Event B through its occurrence, then may become the cause of an effect called C. Therefore, if you want to understand how it came to Z, you have to go back . . . into the past. For this linear direction, you take the opposite direction now and you go back into the past; you find out how this all arose and then how to solve it. And then you have to make your patient see it, too, and the patient then has insight. And when he has insight, then he changes. In 33 years—let me make this blasphemic remark—in 33 years, I have not seen this happen—even once. This is a myth that has been handed down to every one of us in training.1
In short, the kinds of therapeutic insights portrayed in films such as Ordinary People, enthralling as they are to watch, are remarkably rare. An exploration of the past is certainly a worthwhile endeavour for many people. But assuming we must first go back (into the past) before moving forward, can prevent us from making positive changes, today.
Footnotes
- Shôshin 2016. (2017, September 5). Paul Watzlawick – in english (circa 1990 – audio recording). Retrieved September 24, 2020, from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYArQQsqSvc
