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In 1956 the Bateson group published the first of a series of important
papers, “Towards a Theory of Schizophrenia” (Bateson et al. 1956). There
Bateson advanced his famous concept of the
double bind
, and we should note
that this is entirely cybernetic. Much like the contradictory conditioning of
Pavlov's dogs and Walter's tortoises, the double bind was envisaged as a re-
peated situation to which the sufferer could find no satisfactory response.
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The first schizophrenia paper gave as an example a mother who encouraged
her son to display conventionally loving behavior but froze and repelled him
whenever he did, and then asked him what was wrong with him when he
moved away. Like Pavlov and Walter, then, Bateson understood schizophre-
nia as a possible response to this sort of contradictory situation. If there is no
normal way to go on, one has to find some abnormal response—total with-
drawal from communication, paranoid suspicion, an inability to take anything
literally, mistaking inner voices for the outside world, and so on.
4
Thus the basic plot, and two points need clarification here. One is the
thought that Bateson's interest in communication patterns might seem to
move us away from the cybernetic concern with performance and toward the
more familiar representational brain and self. He is, however, better seen as
again elaborating a performative understanding of communication, both ver-
bal and nonverbal—a notion of speech as a representational detour leading
out of and back to performance. The mother and son in the example are not
exchanging information so much as eliciting and responding to the behavior
of the other.
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This leads to the second point. Bateson did not think that the mother in
the example
caused
her son's schizophrenia in any linear fashion. Instead, as
I mentioned earlier, on the model of the homeostat, he thought of all the par-
ties as adapting to one another in a trial-and-error search through the space of
performance, and of schizophrenia as an instance of the whole system reach-
ing a state of equilibrium having bizarre properties.
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S C H I Z O P H R E N I A A N D E N L I G H T E N M E N T
In the eastern relIgIon, zen buddhIsm, the goal Is to achIeve enlIghten-
ment. the zen master attempts to brIng about enlIghtenment In hIs
pupIl In varIous ways. one of the thIngs he does Is to hold a stIck
over the pupIl's head and say fIercely, “If you say thIs stIck Is
real, I wIll strIke you wIth It. If you say thIs stIck Is not real, I
wIll strIke you wIth It. If you don't say anythIng, I wIll strIke you
wIth It.” we feel that the schIzophrenIc fInds hImself contInually
