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In the same sItuatIon as the pupIl, but he achIeves somethIng lIke
dIsorIentatIon rather than enlIghtenment. the zen pupIl mIght reach
up and take the stIck away from the master—who mIght accept thIs
response, but the schIzophrenIc has no choIce sInce wIth hIm there
Is no not carIng about the relatIonshIp, and hIs mother's aIms and
awareness are not lIke the master's.
GreGory Bateson et al.,
“towards a theory of schIzophrenIa”
(1956, 208)
In the same 1956 publication, Bateson made another important move which
again echoes the general concerns of cybernetics, this time with strange per-
formances and the East, but making a much tighter connection to psychiatry
than Walter. Bateson noted a formal similarity between the double bind and
the contradictory instructions given to a disciple by a Zen master—Zen ko-
ans.
7
In the terms I laid out before, the koan is a technology of the nonmodern
self that, when it works, produces the dissolution of the modern self which
is the state of Buddhist enlightenment. And Bateson's idea was that double
binds work in much the same way, also corroding the modern, autonomous,
dualist self. The difference between the two situations is, of course, that the
Zen master and disciple both know what is going on and where it might be
going, while no one in the schizophrenic family has the faintest idea. The
symptoms of schizophrenia, on this account, are the upshot of the sufferer's
struggling to retain the modern form while losing it—schizophrenia as the
dark side of modernity.
This, then, is where Eastern spirituality entered Bateson's approach to psy-
chiatry, as a means of expanding the discursive field beyond the modern self.
8
And here it is interesting to bring in two more English exiles to California,
Alan Watts and Aldous Huxley. Watts was a very influential commentator on
and popularizer of Zen Buddhism in the United States in the 1950s, and he was
also a consultant on Bateson's schizophrenia project (Haley 1976, 70). Two of
the project's principals, Haley and Weakland, “took a course from Watts on
the parallels between Eastern philosophy and Western psychiatry, back in the
days when he was Director of the American Academy of Asian Studies. I think
the focus on Zen offered us an alternative to the ideas about change offered
in psychiatry in the 1950s” (Haley 1976, 107). It makes sense, then, to see Zen
as a constitutive element of the Batesonian approach to schizophrenia. And,
interestingly, Bateson's cybernetics also fed back into Watts's expositions of
