Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 5.1.
gregory bateson in the mid-1950s. (used courtesy of lois bateson.)
anthropologist in Bali and New Guinea, and in 1940 he moved from Britain
to the United States, where he worked for the Office of Strategic Services,
the forerunner of the CIA, from 1943 until 1945. Bateson was married to the
American anthropologist Margaret Mead from 1936 until 1950, and together
they were among the founding members of the Macy cybernetics conferences
held between 1946 and 1953. In the same period Bateson's interests took a
psychiatric turn, as he lectured at the Langley Porter Clinic in San Francisco
and then worked as an ethnologist at the Veterans Administration Hospital in
Palo Alto, California (1949-63).
1
What follows seeks to trace out some of the
main features of Bateson's psychiatric work as it developed in a ten-year proj-
ect which formally began in 1952 with a two-year grant from the Rockefeller
Foundation. Bateson was joined in this project by Jay Haley, John Weakland,
and William Fry in 1953 and by Don Jackson in 1954.
2
