BREAKING OUT OF
THE DOUBLE BIND
1978 – Breaking Out of the Double Bind, an interview edited by Daniel Goleman. Psychology Today, Vol. 12 (August), pp. 42-51.
Like a Zen master, Gregory Bateson turns thought back on itself, as he looks for the patterns behind patterns, the processes that connect people and things. At 73, one of the last generalists in the human sciences sums up his work.
Gregory Bateson, interviewed by Daniel Goleman
***
he 20th century has turned out growing numbers and baffling varieties of specialists, who seem to say more and more about less and less. One of the last of a fading breed of generalists is Gregory’ Bateson, who in the 50 years since receiving his M.A. in anthropology from Cambridge University has challenged the assumptions and methods in almost all the human sciences in turn, including anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, economics, learning theory, sociobiology, and evolution.
In psychology, the British-born scholar is best known for his part in developing the double-bind theory of schizophrenia, a specific application of his broader study of paradox in human communication. The schizophrenic, according to the theory, is a person caught in a net of contradictory’ messages from family members who escapes the Catch-22s in his life by plunging into illness. By describing some of the fatal traps in communications within the family, the double-bind theory laid the groundwork for the family-therapy movement—for which Bateson is a kind of patron saint.
Bateson, now an American citizen living in California (see profile, page 44), is well known wherever people thinking about the frontiers of consciousness gather, from Esalen to Lindisfarne, a think tank on New York’s Long Island. He has been a strong influence on the thought of figures as diverse as R. D. Laing, the British psychiatrist, Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, and Governor Jerry Brown of California, who appointed him to the Board of Regents of the University of California in 1976.
Even so, Bateson’s major book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, is less read than talked about. The reason is that understanding Bateson is hard work: his thinking focuses on the patterns behind patterns, the processes behind logical categories, the relationship of the whole to its parts, the lawful ess of paradox. His range of vision e: ends to a mind-bending realm where t bought turns back on itself. In conversation, he is a Western-intellectual equivalent of a Zen master.
Now 73, Bateson has for some months been battling cancer. When Psychology Today associate editor Daniel Goleman visited him last spring, he displayed an easygoing openness about his illness, while confiding, “I’m on my last few rounds.” At his home in the redwood forest outside Santa Cruz, Bateson spoke of the eri ; in Western ways of thought that h >elieves make it difficult for us to understand our world and that pose special dangers not only for our social system and for global politics, but also for the ecology of the planet.
Flip Book
continue reading
Breaking Out of the Double Bind