This classic book, available in paperback for the very first time, explores why some people can successfully change their lives and others cannot. Here famed psychologist Paul Watzlawick presents what is still often perceived as a radical idea: that the solutions to our problems are inherently embedded in the problems themselves.

Tackling the age-old questions surrounding persistence and change, the book asks why problems arise and are perpetuated in some instances but easily resolved in others. Incorporating ideas about human communication, marital and family therapy, the therapeutic effects of paradoxes and of action-oriented techniques of problem resolution, Change draws much from the field of psychotherapy.

The book is divided into six sections: Theory (includes articles on the study of the family and human communication); Research (reports of research projects); Training (use of videotape, training of nonprofessionals); Normality, Neurosis, and Psychosis; Change (the therapeutic process); and Family Medicine (the impact of somatic illness on family interaction). Over the years MRI has viewed family therapy not as a new, additional treatment method, but, first, as a new way of conceptualizing human problems, and, secondly, as a different therapeutic approach based on this conceptualization. This form of therapy does not consider why something happens (what in an individual's past causes and emotional problem), but what is happening (what is going on right now between individuals; is there a pattern of interaction and what are the attempted solutions). This, then, is the common denominator of the papers brought together in this volume, since it is this perspective and resulting procedure that constitutes the basis of most of the work performed at MRI. Paul Watzlawick is research associate at MRI and clinical associate professor, department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, at Stanford University Medical Center. John H. Weakland is research associate and associate director of the Brief Therapy Center at MRI.