Watzlawick's axioms of the pragmatics of human communication are presented: the ineviability to communicate in an interpersonal situation and the simultaneous occurrence of communication and metacommunication. Dyadic interactions are described as resulting in either a symmetrical or a complementary type of relationship. These concepts are connected to the necessary phenomenon of punctuation of sequences and it is concluded that they must be understood as useful instruments of language and description but nothing more if the idea of circular causality is to be maintained. Psychiatric disturbances, neurotic as well as psychotic, are described as forms of paradoxial communication, because of conflict between different levels of communication. The double bind hypothesis is briefly explained.