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Ashby's psychiatric interests were not tied to any specific form of mental pa-
thology, Bateson and Laing's work focused in particular on schizophrenia, and
the “visionary” quality of schizophrenia was central to their extension of psy-
chiatry in a spiritual direction. And, fourth, we will also have a chance here to
examine in more detail connections between cybernetics and the sixties.
Unlike the four principals of this topic, Laing and Bateson have been much
written about, so this chapter does not explore their work in depth compa-
rable that of the chapters 3 and 4. Bateson was interested in many topics dur-
ing the course of his life, but I will only cover his psychiatric phase. Laing
was a professional psychiatrist throughout his working life, but I focus only
on the period of his greatest fame and notoriety, the sixties—partly because
I am interested in the sixties, but also because the therapeutic communities
established in the sixties by Laing's Philadelphia Association offer us a stark
example of what the symmetric version of cybernetics can look like in prac-
tice. Neither Bateson nor Laing worked alone, so their names often feature
here as a convenient shorthand for groups of collaborators.
Gregory Bateson
the true challenge Is how not to play the game by the rules of natu-
ral scIence . . . how to establIsh an authorIty that enables the
pursuIt of the possIbIlItIes of an altered scIence, one that Is far
less destructIve.
Peter Harries-Jones,
“understandIng ecologIcal aesthetIcs”
(2005, 67)
my personal InspIratIon has owed much to the men who over the last
two hundred years have kept alIve the Idea of a unIty between mInd
and body:
Lamarck
. . .
WiLLiam BLake
. . .
SamueL ButLer
. . .
r. G.
coLLinGWood
. . . and
WiLLiam BateSon
, my father, who was certaInly
ready In 1894 to receIve the cybernetIc Ideas.
GreGory Bateson,
StepS to an ecoLoGy of mind
(2000, xxI-xxII)
Gregory Bateson (fig. 5.1)
was born in Grantchester, near Cambridge, in 1904,
the son of the eminent geneticist William Bateson, and died in San Francisco
in 1980. He studied at Cambridge, completing the natural science tripos in
1924 and the anthropological tripos in 1926, and was a research fellow at
St. John's College from 1931 to 1937. He made his prewar reputation as an
