Abstract
This year marks the centenary of Gregory Bateson's birth.
Bateson, multiply described as a biologist, anthropologist, cybernetic theorist and natural philosopher, remains an elusive but remarkable figure. To some he was a great cross-disciplinary thinker who profoundly affected their thinking about psychiatry, yet to others he was an obscure guru whose books are now deservedly out of print.
Bateson led a peripatetic life, never settling into a discipline or a tenured position. His writing is often dismissed as too abstract or mystical. His best known theory in psychiatry, the Double Bind Theory of Schizophrenia [1], is now often regarded as unable to establish any empirical base, a piece of junk science. Bateson died in 1980 at the San Francisco Zen Centre, having spent his last years at the Esalen Institute, California, as a ‘scholar-inresidence’. His last work and grand summation ‘Mind and Nature’ [2] was denounced by a Times Literary Supplement reviewer as ‘coming from the intellectual lotus land of California where eclectic theories and mystical philosophies are as thick as the LA smog’ [3].
Yet, especially after his 1972 book ‘Steps to an Ecology of Mind’ [4], he was a hero to many, drawn to his vision of a ‘Science of Mind and Order’. Bateson's vision challenged the reductionism, materialism and dualism of Western Science. Instead, he proposed a new philosophic stance (or ‘epistemology’) of cybernetic circularity, sacred unity and ecologic awareness with everything connected in a great hierarchically ordered class of integrative processes he eventually called ‘mind’. In recent listings of the books most influential to them in psychiatry both Helm Stierlin [5] and George Szmukler [6] cite Bateson. Chris Beels calls ‘Steps’ ‘the fundamental text of the invisible university to which my generation of social therapists belonged’ [7].
So, what is Bateson's legacy?Was he the great theoretical scientist of the last century whose lessons are yet to be learnt? Or was he a marginal figure of fashion, now lost in the bleak history of unstrung psychiatric theorizing?
To approach this question, we shall adopt a Batesonian method, spelling out the contexts of his life and ideas, and linking them to the fundamental questions he explored. In Bateson's famous words, we shall try to find in his life ‘the pattern that connects’.
Early life: Cambridge, Mendel and zoology
Bateson was born in Grantchester in 1904, into the intellectual aristocracy of Edwardian England [8]. His paternal grandfather, William Henry, was the Master of St. Johns College, Cambridge, a liberal reformer of university traditions. Bateson's father William had founded the immensely influential Cambridge School of Genetics. In 1900, William had come across Gregor Mendel's previously unknown 1865 experiments on cross-breeding peas. He instantly recognized their significance and became ‘Mendel's apostle’, introducing Mendelian ideas to the English-speaking scientific world.
It was at a time when Darwinian theory had reached an impasse. The natural selection of species proposed by Darwin in 1859 used a model of ‘blending inheritance’. But Darwin was hard pressed to explain why a trait, once selected, was then not blended away in future generations. Blending could not account for the diversity of inherited factors. The puzzle was solved with the recognition of ‘Mendelian factors’ (soon known as genes), ‘particles’ that preserved their identity across generations without becoming diluted [9]. The (re)discovery of Mendel was the vital breakthrough. William Bateson wrote: ‘only those who remember the utter darkness before the Mendelian dawn can appreciate what happened’ [10]. He named his third son Gregory after Mendel, and coined the term ‘Genetics’. Yet later William became maligned as an ‘anti-Darwinist’ and has been marginalized in the history of genetics. He was never convinced that natural selection based on the model of one gene – one characteristic (‘genetic atomism’) could fully explain evolutionary change. He vigorously opposed the biometric, statistical approach that based evolution on the accumulation of small, continuous variations, believing this could not account for the discontinuous variations found in species. William was trained in embryology, and always sought to show lawful pattern and regularity, form and symmetry in species. The degree of organization required for the development of an adult organism could not be generated by single genes alone. William did not think the genes in chromosomes were so central: there must be more to it. A rancorous debate continued, not resolved for many years. But contemporary genomics vindicates Bateson. Chromosomes are the site of genes, but genes move readily between chromosomes, and chromosomes are not directly causal of individual development: interactions with the environment are also significant [11].
But William Bateson died defeated. At the end of his life, he told Gregory that it was a mistake to have committed his life to Mendelism, a blind alley [10].
William's positions foreshadowmany of the patterns of Gregory's life: the advocacy of new ideas; the fascination with the morphology of form and pattern; the rejection of individual genetic determinism for models of interactional and ecologic lawfulness; the embrace of mental as well as physical factors in evolutionary history.
Gregory's childhood was ‘in the middle of natural history and beetle collecting’ [12]. His forceful parents were confirmed atheists, but William insisted that his sons would not grow up into ‘empty-headed atheists’ and the Bible was read at breakfast, along with William Blake. Gregory had two older brothers. Both were to die tragically, which marked him all his life [7].
Breaking away to the Pacific
Like his father, Bateson gained a First in Zoology at Cambridge. His first publication was in collaboration with William, on genetic variations in Red Legged Partridges [13]. Like any young English gentleman would, Gregory went on an expedition to the Galapagos, but turned away from zoology. ‘The most interesting fauna was the people in the world’ [8]. He was moving away from Cambridge towards the Pacific Rim, where he would live in various places for the rest of his life. It was a time when the first glittering generation of field workers led by W.H. Pitts Rivers and A.C. Haddon at Cambridge were putting anthropology on to the intellectual stage, and Bateson came under the influence of his Cambridge peer A.R. Radcliffe-Brown. Brown, who established the Chair of Social Anthropology in Sydney, saw societies as functionally analogous to organisms. Bateson commenced field work in New Britain, and the Sepik River in New Guinea. For a short time lived in Sydney, lecturing on Pacific languages in Brown's department. Returning to the Sepik in 1931, he struggled: ‘hopelessly sick of fieldwork. My belly is full of travelling and poking my nose into the affairs of other races’ [8]. Dissatisfied with the poverty of anthropologic theory of the time, he could not find a unifying theme among the disconnected scraps of data that field work offered.
Around this time he met Margaret Mead, beginning their remarkable partnerships [14]. She was enchanted by how English biologists think: ‘they would pick up illustrations right across the field. One minute from embryology, the next from geology, the next from anthropology, back and forth, very freely, so that the illustrations from one spot illuminated, corrected and expanded the one from another’ [14], p.173].
Bateson had intense conversations in New Guinea with Mead and her husband Reo Fortune. Revitalized he returned to England: ‘If you're out in the tropics and you have a major idea, the thing to do is pack up and come home’ [14], p.165].
The major idea was incorporated into Naven [15]. Bateson described his book as ‘experiments in thinking: a study of the ways data can be fitted together’. It was the beginning of his epistemologic and cybernetic explorations. As a book it is, as Bateson acknowledges, ‘rather unreadable’. The Naven is an elaborate ritual performed by the Iatmul, a headhunting people in the middle reaches of the Sepik River. The ritual involves transvestism, mock homosexuality and dramatic reversals of behaviour. Making sense of a weird ritual was the classic sort of problem anthropologists took on. Bateson took several years to construct his ethnographic picture. In the end, he explained the Naven as an elaborate dance that dealt with tensions between kinship groups in a very patrilineal culture.
In Naven, Bateson was developing his critique of induction, the generalizing and universalizing from particular data, as the basis of science. Bateson rejected induction: rather he saw his project like an artist, trying to grasp the wholeness and inter-relatedness of a culture, rather than exploring particular facts. Hewas interested in something beyond description of raw data or middle-range analysis. Why, he asked, did he portray the patterns of culture the way he did? He was the observer observing himself, while resisting accepted methodologies and category systems. Instead, he advocated a combination of ‘strict and loose thinking’ [4], p.75] that ‘lead me into wild hunches and at the same time compelled me into more formal thinking about those hunches, a double habit of mind’. This did not make him popular with his anthropologic colleagues. Naven was dismissed as ‘precocious metatheoretical introspection’ [7], and ‘with too many personal elements to be called without qualification, scientific’ [16].
Schismogenesis, Margaret Mead and Bali
Naven did propose a process which became known as Bateson's first major idea: schismogenesis. This occurs when cumulative interactions between two distinct but related groups lead to more extreme or sharply differentiated patterns than would otherwise have occurred. In symmetrical schismogenesis, each of the groups tries to outdo the other, for example, in domination or boasting. In complementary schismogenesis, a reciprocal relationship becomes more one-sided or more one-down, one-up, for example, display-spectatorship. These such formal patterns of interaction that can be seen at any level of relationship, for example, marriages, international relations and arms races. Bateson proposed that the Naven ritual was a cybernetic governor that stopped symmetrical schismogenesis from going into runaway and mutual destruction [15]. The details of Naven are perhaps not that important, but the idea of schismogenesis has wide application, an example of the fundamental pattern Bateson was always looking for.
But if British social anthropology did not appreciate Bateson, with his critique of induction and his advocacy of ‘strict and loose thinking’, Margaret Mead certainly did.
Mead and Bateson married on the way to Bali in 1936, Bateson correcting the proofs of Naven on their honeymoon [14], p.173].1 In Bali, they were funded to study cultural aspects of ‘dementia praecox’. The Balinese were given to trances, and by Western standards were out of touch with reality in ways Western psychiatry might define as schizophrenia, or so the argument went. What conditions of child raising in the culture might create the propensity for engaging in trances? Bateson and Mead were captivated by the vividness of Balinese life. They pioneered visual anthropology with the systematic use of photographs. Bateson developed an astounding 25 000 still photos, all thoroughly annotated by Mead. Their 1 Mead later said their marriage was ‘an incomparable model of what anthropological fieldwork can be like, even if the model includes the kind of extra intensity in which a lifetime is condensed into a few short years’ (p.176). elegant book, Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis, has never been surpassed [17].
This book gives a glimpse of Bateson's aesthetic sense. R.D. Laing commented: ‘he had the most distinctive perceptual capacities of anyone I've met…’ [18], p.21].
As for the origins of the trance, Bateson's photos did show a pattern in Balinese children of intense arousal then frustration by parental figures. Mead and Bateson speculated that the ‘schizoid’ withdrawal into vacancy and away from activity they observed in Balinese men was an effect of this childhood training in arousal and frustration. Bateson also noted that schismogenic interactions were much less common inBali than in the Iatmul. Instead, interactions were muted and static, and did not reach climax. ‘Culture-and-personality’ anthropology as practised by Mead and Bateson is now rather dated, but as Geertz notes, their observations of the Balinese were ‘unmatched by any of us’ [19], p.4].
World War II
Returning to New York at the outbreak of World War II, Bateson went on to England, but returned when his daughter Mary Catherine was born [20].
During the war he worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA. Of this time Bateson said: ‘It was two dully wasted years in India and Ceylon trying to introduce a few anthropological ideas into U.S. intelligence, relieved by fieldwork in Lower Burma’. Afterwards, he was consistently negative about his wartime experiences, and damning of applied anthropology in Intelligence Services.
However, a recent paper on the role of anthropologists in Intelligence Services, based on freedom of information data from Washington, shows Bateson to have been very committed and brave, indeed decorated [21]. His war work involved the introduction ofmisinformation, and attempts to generate schismogenesis in enemy patterns of communications. It is not clear how successful this was at the time, but certainly these propaganda tactics were later used by the CIA. Bateson maintained his CIA connections, including his participation in the 1950s experiments with LSD at Stanford [22]. Bateson did what was asked of him during the war. After all he had a brother who had died in World War I. But later he clearly regretted it, and was suspicious of large organizations for the rest of his life.
Post-war cybernetics
Post-war Bateson became a founding member of an extraordinary cross-disciplinary group ‘the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics’. This was a group of mathematicians and social scientists who explored the applications of the new ideas of cybernetics, information theory and digital computers coming out of wartime research [23]. It was a time of both great hope and Cold War paranoia. Bateson's interest was an extension of his work in cultural anthropology on howsocial systems organize and stabilize. He saw the possibility of the new cybernetics offering the precision of mathematics to these processes. Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, became his mentor in the vocabulary of computers, formal logic and communication theory. Wiener had solved the wartime problem of anti-aircraft artillery control, by working out the mathematics of guidance and control systems based on feedback. Wiener coined the term ‘cybernetics’, Greek for ‘steersman’ [24]. Machines (like organisms) received input and, in turn, produced output (behaviour). When output circled around to become input, the machine acquired a means for responding to the effects of its own behaviour. ‘Output’ becoming ‘input’ gave the machine a way of developing a purposeful ‘mentality’, as feedback advanced the machine to a goal. Feedback loops are abstract patterns of relationships. They are embedded in physical structures or living organisms but can be formally distinguished from the actual physical structure. In terms of formal patterns, a machine and an organism are equivalent. Feedback was a general pattern of life, or more precisely ‘mind’, an idea Bateson would develop over the rest of his life [25].
Cybernetic ideas were sufficiently general to provide a vocabulary that could unify biological and social sciences in a new paradigm of information that focused on form, pattern and circularity (rather than reductive, linear energy mechanisms). Information, ‘the difference that makes a difference’, was the foundation. Bateson was not a mathematician, and his dislike for engineering is well documented. His tool was the English language and he used mathematical and logical concepts as metaphors to formulate his conceptual schemes. But he could claim to be a founder of cybernetics. He was a key figure at the Macy Conferences who would also become the most trenchant critic of the mechanistic and determinist drift of cybernetics in later years [26].
For Bateson, cybernetics became the explanatory epistemology for all communicative systems found in nature. Once the cybernetic rules of coupling and communication were understood, then the Cartesian dualisms of subject and object (or mind and matter, or nature and culture) could be dispensed with. It was no longer necessary to banish the Ghost from the Machine. Instead, it was realized even machines had ‘a mind’: the Ghost and the Machine were one. The ‘ancient superstition’ of the mind–body split was resolved, at least for Bateson.
Psychiatry, alcoholism, non-verbal communication
In the late 1940s, separated from Margaret Mead, and failing to be rehired at Harvard amid rumours that it was because he advocated all anthropologists should be psychoanalysed [8], Bateson moved to San Franciso. Here, he became more officially affiliated with psychiatry. Working at the Langley Porter Clinic with Jurgen Ruesch, he researched psychotherapy, or as he put it ‘the nature of communication among a tribe called psychiatrists’. Bateson worked ethnographically, taping interviews, jotting notes and lecturing. He was stimulating to some, but puzzling to most. Psychiatric residents would complain ‘Bateson knows something which he does not tell you’ [8], p.196].
He worked with alcoholics, later the subject of his great essay ‘The Cybernetics of Self: A Theory of Alcoholism’, on how the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) coincides with a cybernetic epistemology [4]. It is the ‘false pride’ of the alcoholic that he can ‘beat the bottle’ that results in a recurrent symmetrical battle for control that leads to further drinking. The AA model proposes that attaining such control is impossible. Alcoholics Anonymous accepts a complementary position to the bottle: ‘I can't control it, I can't drink, it will kill me’. Accepting there is a ‘greater power’ leads, by the Twelve Steps, to a new epistemology, a cybernetic one, that allows change and acceptance to occur at deeper levels. The cycle of addiction and control is thus broken and the ‘self’ is reorganized as attempts for conscious control are given up. The AA example was later used by Bateson as a metaphor for the logic of error in much larger domains. He argued, for example, that the addictive patterns of consumption in industrial civilization are fed by false beliefs that managerial and technologic solutions can always be found to control ecologic degradation. What is needed instead is a reorganization of Western thinking about relations with the environment that recognizes such control is not possible, just as the alcoholic lets go of the addictive idea that ‘he can beat the bottle’. For Bateson, we are part of nature. It is not something we can beat or overcome [27]. Bateson, quoting the Bible, says ‘[The Ecologic] God is not mocked’.
Bateson also studied non-verbal communication in families and the role of paralanguage and gestural – kinesic exchanges in regulating behaviour and qualifying meanings [27]. Later he was to claim: ‘We made a film in '49 at the Langley Porter Clinic of the fact that minor patterns of (non-verbal) exchange are the major sources of mental illness. And nobody in '49 could look at the film; the professionals could just not see it’ [28]. His theoretical book with Ruesch ‘Communication, the Social Matrix of Psychiatry’ received much the same mute reception [29]. It was a proposal for cybernetic circular models of information as the foundation of psychiatric theory. It foreshadowed later ideas of how systems of communication are constructed out of patterns of interaction. The book was also a critique of tendencies in conventional psychiatry to reify abstractions into definitions of pathology, often based on materialistic psychic energy models (like Libido Theory). The book foreshadowed social constructionism as way of overcoming the split between social (external) and psychological (internal) models of behaviour, but in 1951 it was too radical to be understood.
Logical typing and the paradoxes of abstraction
One concept developed in the book was the idea of analogic and digital coding. This idea had first been proposed by von Neumann at aMacy Conference. In this ‘information age’, it is now commonplace, but it was novel then. A signal is digital if it differs sharply or is discontinuous from the external events it represents; an analogic signal has a shape or continuity related to the subject matter it represents. Bateson argued linguistic behaviour is digital, while body language tends to be analogic. Human communication occurs simultaneously along both channels. The relation between these two channels of communication could be understood by applying another analogy from logic, the Russell–Whitehead Theory of Logical Types [30]. Put simply, Bateson argued that analogic communication was of a higher level, or logical type than digital. One qualified, or provided the context for the other.
This is a central Batesonian insight, perhaps his most important one: that a vertical classification is the essential component in the ordering of communication. We must always look for and classify the levels of any communication. Not to do this is to invite confusion and paradox. In ‘Principia Mathematica’, Russell had proposed there is always a discontinuity between a class and its members, a hierarchical gap. For example, the class of machinery is of a higher logical type or level of abstraction than a member like typewriters or tape recorders. When a class is mistaken for a member logical paradoxes can occur. The classic example is the famous paradox presented by the Cretan who says ‘All Cretans are liars’. (If this is true, its not true etc.) This contains both a statement, and a statement about the statement, the second being of a different level of abstraction from the first. Principia Mathematica forbade such conflations of different hierarchical levels in logic and insisted on markers, subscripts, quotation marks, etc. to indicate the levels. But in nature it is not so precise. Breaches of logical typing, of confusion of levels, are always occurring. Digital messages (e.g. verbal reports) are accompanied by analogic gestures (e.g. non-verbal commands), but thesemessages are at different levels, one being ametacomment on the other. When these levels are denied or confused, for example, when literal (digital) messages are disqualified by gestural (analogic) messages, contradictions will arise and paradoxes generated, with behavioural consequences. Such thinking became the basis for Bateson's next project, titled ‘The Paradoxes of Abstraction in Communication’. He was aiming to sort out the levels and logical classes used in the social sciences. And so the famous (and infamous) Double Bind Theory of Schizophrenia [1] was generated.
Double binds and schizophrenia
Looking back it must be said that the Double Bind theory must be a candidate for both the most generative and the most misunderstood theory in psychiatry.
Bateson assembled a team, the Palo Alto group, all of whom later rose to prominence in family therapy, including Jay Haley, John Weakland and Don Jackson. According to Haley, they struggled for a long time ‘with how ‘paradoxes of abstraction’ were relevant to anything in human life' [1]. Bateson believed in naturalistic observation, but even more in deduction. From observation of thought disorder in schizophrenic subjects, Haley proposed that schizophrenic ‘word salad’ as an example of failing to separate the logical levels between literal and metaphoric statements. Such misreadings led to strange phenomena as the apocryphal patient who ‘ate the menu when he was hungry’. Bateson was trying to discover the context which could make such unintelligible behaviour intelligible, just as he had with the Iatmul. During a trip to New York, he speculated with Wiener that a telephone system might be termed ‘schizophrenic’ if it took numbers mentioned in the conversation between subscribers for those numbers which represent the names of subscribers [8]. The hypothetical idea of a learning context which created paradoxical confusions was developed. ‘What contexts generate confusions in logical typing between communicants, and what will be the effects?’
The Palo Alto group argued deductively that the unconventional habits of thought seen in schizophreniawere the effects of certain contexts: thought disorder was part of a larger system. The name the group gave to contexts carrying such confusions was ‘the double bind’.
Soon the famous paper ‘Towards a Theory of Schizophrenia’ was published [31]. Bateson always thought it had been hurried into publication. The long deductive arguments were cut by the editors, leaving the impression the authors were generalizing from case studies [26]. This was not the case.
In its original formulation, the paper defined the necessary ingredients of the Double Bind as:
It was a complex paper and it drew complex reactions for the next 40 years. The so-called ingredients were continuously revised by the group. Their final statement, in 1962, withdrew from aetiologic claims for schizophrenia, and the notion of a binder acting on a victim. Instead, they proposed ‘the most useful way is phrasing double bind description in terms of people caught up in an ongoing system which produces conflicting definitions of the relationships and consequent subjective distress’ [32].
By that time the idea of double binding had gripped both the scientific and popular imagination. It had great intuitive appeal to clinicians working with families and individuals whose lives seemed ‘stuck’ or ‘in a bind’. It came tomean many things: Catch 22, or incongruent double messages, or knots [18], or a situation where a person cannot win no matter what. Often these ideas were far removed from the original construct. Sometimes the concept drew abuse. Shorter comments that it was a theory ‘… where the mother was the cause of the children's psychosis’ [33]. This was a misunderstanding, but not an incomprehensible one.
In truth, the theory was very slippery at an empirical level. It was, Abeles concluded, ‘an unresearchable construct’: ‘It was not possible to isolate the participants and components and events and history and context of a pattern and still have that pattern’ [1]. Bateson himself acknowledged it was ‘so slippery that perhaps no imaginable set of empirical facts could contradict it’ [1], p.320]. For him the Double Bind was an idea, a formal pattern coming from observing communicative interactions, but not identical with any single instance of communication. Actual behaviours were markers (or embodiments) of the pattern, but the Double Bind is a class at a higher level of analysis. It does not cause anything, and is not especially relevant to schizophrenia. It is more like a new language, or an ‘epistemology’ in Bateson's rather idiosyncratic use of the term. Learning the language led to learning to organize observations in terms of patterning of communication and systems of influence. By grasping this unit of analysis, therapists learnt, as they say, to ‘think family’.
After 10 years, and a project that produced 63 papers, Bateson grew tired of psychiatry [8]. In particular, he was weary with his conflicts with Jay Haley, his talented collaborator. Haley was interested in the application of cybernetic ideas to therapy. He wanted results. Bateson worried about his manipulative and invasive methods. Bateson was always wary of consciously planned intervention at any level of the system, a theme he took on with greater passion as he got older. His opposition to Haley was based on Haley's emphasis on ‘power’ as an explanation of social interaction. Bateson was not interested in ‘power plays’ and was suspicious of Haley's incorporation of ‘power’ into hismodels of therapy. To Bateson the metaphor of power led back to a kind of survival-of-thefittest Darwinism he had learnt to abhor from William Bateson.
Bateson also felt pre-empted by his research team with the publication of ‘Pragmatics of Human Communication’ in 1967 [34]. This book went on to become the classic text explicating the new ideas of communication theory. Haley reported Bateson saying the book ‘stole thirty of his ideas’. Pragmatics presented communication theory and practice in isolation from its larger cultural and evolutionary contexts. This did make the ideas very clear but was anathema to Bateson [26], p.28].
Bateson left Palo Alto accompanied by a ‘growing distaste for all the people concerned, including the psychiatrists, the patients, the psychologists, the families and the VA hospital and boredom with the repetitive nature of the transactional patterns all these persons exhibit’ [26], p.28].
He set off to John Lilly's research centres and Florida and the Virgin Islands, and later to the Oceania Institute, Hawaii, to study communication among dolphins. As Parks notes: ‘Nobody could reasonably expect him to change the lives of dolphins. His real goal in Palo Alto had never been therapy, but research’ [35].
‘Towards a Theory of Schizophrenia’, despite its difficulties in empirical application (or perhaps because of them)was a newbeginning, the foundational paper for the field of family therapy. It opened a new landscape, and placed the intrapsychic field of psychoanalysis within the network of exchanges of this larger unit. It gave birth to a new group of social and interactional therapies of which family therapy was the first, including narrative, solution-based, strategic and network therapies [36]. The borders of psychotherapy were expanded, as a new language that made disturbed behaviour socially intelligible generated wider and wider descriptions. These descriptions used the language of communication and context, hierarchy and levels, boundaries and homeostasis, feedback and interaction. They were expanded, ‘ecosystemic’ ways of seeing the world and they drew many converts.
Don Jackson proposed the Palo Alto group form the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Stanford, the first of many free-standing family therapy institutes in the world. (Bateson did not join [37]. He did not want his consultant (Jackson) over him as director – he was very aware of strange loops!) In 1963, MRI sponsored Family Process, still the pre-eminent journal in the field.
In Milan, Palazolli and her group rigorously extended Bateson's logic into a highly original therapeutic method, and formulated the key ‘systemic guiding principles’ of hypothesizing, circularity and neutrality [38–39]. Circular questioning became for systemic therapy what free association was for psychoanalysis. It was based on the Batesonian idea of ‘information of difference’. Questions are asked sequentially to bring out patterns and connections in a system ‘Who is closest to who, next closest.… If brother left who would be next closest, who would be saddest?’ etc. A whole range of inventive questions has since been generated. The great early promise of the Milan approaches, with their rather extravagant declarations of ‘cures’ for schizophrenia and anorexia have faded, but their ideas have found wide application in family therapy.
Much less dramatic than the Milan group, the careful cumulative work in psychoeducational approaches in schizophrenia has perhaps borne greater fruit [40]. The Double Bind theory prompted research into the entanglements, over-closeness and ‘transactional’ thought disorder often observed in families with schizophrenic members. These were not universal phenomena, and may well be an effect of having a schizophrenic family member rather than a cause. Nevertheless, careful research has shown the validity of such constructs as Expressed Emotion, and the positive benefits of modifying negative affective interactional styles by Psychoeducational and multiple family group processes. This may be the most important practical legacy of the ideas first proposed by Bateson [41].
Geertz writes that, ‘after a new powerful idea has burst upon the intellectual landscape… to hold for a time the conceptual centre point around which a comprehensive system of analysis can be built, it will be subsequently tamed through application and extension until we recognise the idea does not explain everything…. Our attention shifts to isolating just what that something is and to disentangling ourselves from a lot of pseudo-science to which in the first flush of celebrity it has also given rise’ [42], p.38]. The ‘Double Bind’ was just such a powerful new idea, with family therapy in all its variety being one conventional extension and application. But Bateson was always rather dismayed by the interest of family therapists in his ideas and always vigilant about disengaging from the pseudoscience and the reifications produced by therapists.
‘Steps’
In 1972, Bateson published ‘Steps to an Ecology of Mind’ [4]. It was his first book in 20 years, and his most famous, an anthology of articles which had been scattered in inaccessible journals. ‘Steps’ showed Bateson's thinking across diverse areas including Balinese culture, evolution, schizophrenia, alcoholism, dolphins and cybernetics, as part of a single exploration. A technical label for this thinking might be ‘systems theory’, but Bateson preferred ‘ecology’. The Steps referred to the active ‘stepwise’ participation needed by the reader in integrating his material. The book is obscure in parts, but other parts are elegantly clear. Lyman Wynne called reading Bateson ‘frustrating’ and requiring second readings. But ‘an open meditative frame ofmind, can transform the puzzling passage into one that is lucid and illuminating’ [26], p.82]. Many people who have persevered with Bateson have reported this reaction. Harries–Jones compares Bateson toWittgenstein in the way they both consistently try to show how such formal thinking can operate to illuminate everyday living. Bateson is ‘showing’ how such thinking can occur: his examples and anecdotes are not so much to communicate facts and data, as to bring forth ideas and metaphors [43]. His way of thinking and seeing is not an abstraction, but a tangible experience that can be cultivated by practice. It elucidates and expands rather than describes. Bateson was fond of quoting ee cummings: ‘ever the more beautiful answer who asks the more difficult question’.
Bateson became a hero after Steps, and in the New Age California of his time, something of a cult figure [28]. He lectured widely, speaking out more and more about the ecologic crisis, and the threats of nuclear war, and ‘avoidance of the death of the largest system about which we can care’ [2], p.220]. ‘The organism which destroys its environment destroys itself’ (p.483). But he was no radical. Although adopted by the counterculture, he shared few of its ideas, and rejected its anti-intellectualism and the imprecise language of its pseudospirituality. He was opposed to bad thinking, be it from mechanical behaviourists or mystical idealists.
Like his father he was a conservative, who respected rather than challenged the natural order of things. ‘Perhaps the most convincing evidence that evolution is a mental process is its slowness, its fits and starts, its errors and stupidity. In a word, its conservatism’ [44], p.xii]. In 1974, I heard Bateson lecture, or rather witnessed him performing. He had great physical presence and a resonant King's English voice. He was six feet five inches tall, with a rumpled suit and hair, circling around drawing on a cigarette and coughing. He interacted intensely with the audience, taking up an idea, spinning it around, sending it back. You felt you were collaborating with him, as he pondered out loud with a mysterious smile on his face. He resisted the format of a traditional lecture (he always resisted pre-existing structures), developing his ideas with metaphors, stories and parables rather than following a single theme. He was, I suppose, performing ‘a metalogue’, a style he had often used in his writings, where the form is meant to illustrate the content. He seemed enormously alert to the context and responses of the audience. I found it exhilarating. I could also see why sometimes the audience left disappointed or perplexed.
Margaret Mead spoke of how Bateson in interaction could generate an unusual sense of augmentation of intelligence, ‘a peculiar quality (hard to describe) in which he distilled ideas from interaction with other people which they in turn can distill again’ [45].
Last books
In the late 1970s, Bateson was dying of lung cancer, but with the help of his daughter Mary Catherine completed two more books. ‘Mind and Nature’ written for a general audience, is his most accessible book [2]. It returns to Bateson's first interest in the analogy between evolutionary change and the structure of the mind. A ‘mind’ is any system with a capacity respond to information in self-corrective ways. This is characteristic of living systems, from cells to forests to civilizations. For Bateson there is a holistic unity among human mental process and culture and biology: ‘Mind is a reflection of the large and many parts of the natural world outside the thinker’. He is not interested in reducing matter into mind, but in re-introducing mind into matter as its pattern and fabric, texture and weave. Mind is not above Matter, it is not ‘transcendent’. It is in Matter or ‘immanent’. All biological phenomena are, in his friend Warren McCulloch's phrase, ‘Embodiments of Mind’ [46].
Bateson's idea of ‘mind’ extended beyond the skin. ‘What I am saying expands mind outwards (just as Freudian psychology expanded the concept of mind inwards). Both of these changes reduce the scope of the conscious self. A certain humility becomes appropriate tempered by the dignity or joy of being part of something much bigger’ [4], p.462].
Bateson's defining criteria of mind includes any circular system of interacting parts, where interaction is triggered by difference (‘difference is the analogue of cause’). A mind can include non-living elements as well as multiple organisms and the unit of survival is always the organism-plus-environment which co-evolve together. Such interacting systems select pattern from random elements, as happens in learning and evolution ‘the two great stochastic processes’ [26], that derive novelty out of randomness.
Bateson's strong implication is that the whole of nature is imbued with qualities of mind, and we should treat nature with the same respect due to a human mind. We live within the world of nature, not as ‘rational onlookers’ from the outside. Cartesian detachment and objectivity is a ‘false epistemology’ that results in ‘inappropriate descriptions’. Whatever scientific understanding we achieve must be a kind of understanding that occurs from the ‘inside’. ‘Epistemology is always and invariably personal. The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer. What is my answer to the questions of the nature of knowing? I surrender to the belief that my knowing is a small part of a wider integrated knowing that knits the entire biosphere or creation’ [2], p.87].
Bateson's last book ‘Angels Fear’ [47] was published posthumously, from ‘miscellaneous, unintegrated and incomplete’ manuscripts put together by Mary Catherine Bateson. Bateson traced destructive human actions to inappropriate descriptions, such as those based on by supernaturalism (pure mind without matter) and materialism (matter without mind). He was equally opposed to both. ‘Very simply let me say I despise and fear both of these extremes of opinion and that I believe both extremes to be epistemologically naive, wrong and politically dangerous. They are also dangerous to something which we may loosely call mental health’. His task was ‘to explore whether there is a sane and valid place for religion somewhere between these two nightmares of nonsense’ [47], p.198]. Religion provided ‘a rich, internally structured model that stands in metaphorical relationship to the whole of life, and therefore can be used to think with’ [47], p.195]. Religious processes address vital epistemological problems around the limitations of knowledge and the unavoidable gaps in any description: ‘the only kind of cognitive system that could provide a model for the integration and complexity of the natural world’ [39], p.199]. They can provide solutions to the mind/body problem. For Bateson, who called himself a ‘fifth generation unbaptised atheist’ [48], p.12], it was finally the sacred that could provide the model for the integrated fabric of mental process ‘that envelopes all our lives’. He had returned to the hero of his youth, William Blake, as his inspiration. Like Blake, he was a visionary who saw in an original, unified and particular way [49].
Bateson offered two meanings of ‘sacred’: ‘that with which we shall not tinker’, and ‘a sense of the whole which can only be met with awe… and which inspires humility’ [47], p.48].
‘The sacred’ is the whole, and it is the ‘pattern that connects’ [47], p.200]. It is how parts fit aesthetically into a holistic order, where holism, unity and beauty were coincident with each other. It was not a transcendent, but an immanent holism. As Bateson said, from his house overlooking the Pacific, ‘I am not a deist, but I do believe the ocean out there is alive: is that religious?’.
Bateson died haunted by a sense of urgency that the narrow definition of human purpose which had lost ‘the sacred’ in a materialist and technological society was leading to irreversible ecologic disasters. Like his father, he felt he had not communicated what he knew and he felt deeply misunderstood.
Will his time come, like it finally did for William?
Legacy of Bateson
His biographer, Lipset, comments that Bateson was ‘doubly anachronistic, both ahead and behind his times’ [8], p.xii]. He often seems a throwback to the nineteenth century, continuing the debates around Darwinism and Science led by his father and his other great heroes (William Blake, Samuel Butler, Lewis Carroll, Lamarck, Whitehead and Russell). He did not link up to the contemporary debates in the philosophy of science or mind, especially in his last decade. He never refers to Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend or Searle, and barely to Wittgenstein.
Yet in other ways he remained ahead of his times. As a younger man he pioneered cybernetic and communication theory in social science and psychotherapy. Later he developed holistic and evolutionary models of the self-organizing biosphere. His critique of induction and empiricism as the model for scientific discovery has becomemore accepted. His insistence on relational thinking and ‘double description’, and recursively returning to the data, to observe the observing, is a model for contextual thinking, a language of relations rather than things that leads beyond the linear stimulus–response paradigms of behavioural science and of genetics. His preference for thinking in aesthetic terms of pattern rather than quantitative and reductive terms provides an alternative to the dominant and (to Bateson) pathological systems of thought afflicting industrial civilization.
Batesonmade streams of ideas flowtogether into a confluence of aesthetic, holistic, interactive, recursive and, above all, contextual ways of thinking that foreshadow many ‘post-modern’ developments in biology, ecology and philosophy. His legacy was to show us just how we might develop a systemic wisdom, how we need to think if we are to survive in our new century.
At the end of his life, he wrote about the battle with Moloch, his Blakean image of orthodox scientific opinion ‘Moloch after all is very stupid and quite capable of swallowing the notion that he is, and was always “right” in what he “meant” to say. It is only his language that was wrong. And if the battle must finally be joined, let us choose the battlefield. Moloch will surely do his best to fight the battle on some ground on which he has irrelevant advantage. (He will accuse us of Lamarckism, obscurantism, failure of scholarship, etc. etc.) What is interesting is that the underlying battle is really about the choice of battlefield. Our stand is correctly and precisely upon the question: “Which language shall be used?.…”’ [50].
Bateson offers a new language for taking that stand.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thanks to David Bathgate, Edwin Harari, Max Cornwell, Michael Madden, Brian Cade, Jenny Ouliaris, Graeme Meadows and Chris Beels for helpful discussions.