Paradox in Psychotherapy

Vision is the Art of seeing Things invisible.

Jonathan Swift

Paradox (from Greek paradoxon: contrary to expectation, incredible) has fascinated the human mind for the last two thousand years and it continues to do so in the present day. Some of this century's most important achievements in the areas of logic, mathematics, and epistemology are intimately linked with paradox, notably the development of metamathematics or the theory of proof, the theory of logical types, and problems of consistency, computability, and the like.

Fantasy, play, humor, love, symbolism, social rituals, religious experience in the widest sense, and above all “creativity” in both the arts and the sciences, appear to be in many ways paradoxical. Our daily life as parents, wives, husbands, children, friends, employees, and employers is permeated by chains of paradoxical communications that can appear in many different fashions.

The American College Dictionary defines paradox as “a statement or proposition seemingly self-contradictory or absurd, and yet explicable as expressing the truth.”

According to Watzlawick et al.,¹ paradox may be defined as “a contradiction that follows correct deduction from consistent premises.” This definition allows us to exclude immediately all those forms of “false” paradoxes that are based on a concealed error in reasoning or some fallacy deliberately built into the argument. Of the three types of paradox described by the same author-logicomathematical (antinomies), semantical (semantical antinomies), and pragmatic—the pragmatic is of main interest here because of its behavior implication. Pragmatic paradoxes are distinguished from simple contradictions especially in that choice may be a solution in the latter but not even possible in the former.

Haley² defines as “paradoxical” a situation in which a statement is true if it is false; in fact, he says, it is generated because two statements at different levels of abstraction are being made at once, one of which