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latter form of cybernetic psychiatry with the work of the expatriate English-
man Gregory Bateson (1904-80) and, in the 1960s, with the radical therapeu-
tic experiments of the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing (1927-89).
Unlike my four principals, Bateson and Laing are relatively well known to
scholars, the subject of several topic-length studies, so I will not discuss their
work here to the same depth as the others. But I include a chapter on them for
three reasons. First, because Bateson's approach to psychiatry exemplifies a
move in cybernetics beyond a concern with the physiological brain and toward
something less biologically specified. If Walter and Ashby focused on the adap-
tive brain, Bateson was concerned with something less precise and less struc-
tured, the adaptive subject or self, and how that could be disrupted by what he
called double binds. Laing, from this perspective, played out what Batesonian
psychiatry might look like in practice. Second, simply to emphasize that cyber-
netics was not forever irrevocably locked into the world of electroshock. And
third, continuing that line of thought, because there is an important sense in
which Bateson and Laing were
more cybernetic
than Walter and Ashby. Laing's
psychiatry took seriously, as Walter and Ashby's did not, the idea that we are
all adaptive systems, psychiatrists and schizophrenics alike. I am interested to
follow the practical and institutional ramifications of this move here.
These features of Bateson and Laing's work—looking beyond the biologi-
cal brain, and an extension of cybernetics into the field of the self and social
relations—move us to another theme of this topic, namely, the multiplicity of
cybernetics, its protean quality. I began by defining cybernetics as the science
of the adaptive brain, but even the earliest manifestations of cybernetics ran
in several directions. Tortoises and homeostats could be understood as “brain
science” in the sense of trying to explicate the functioning of the normal brain
as a complex adaptive system—a holistic counterpoint to reductive neuro-
physiology, say. At the same time, as I just mentioned, tortoises and homeostats
could also simulate the abnormal, pathological brain—madness—and hence
stand as a contribution to psychiatry. Furthermore, these cybernetic devices
did not have to be seen in relation to the brain at all, but could also be seen as
things in themselves. Walter's tortoises, for example, were foundational to ap-
proaches to robotics that are very influential today—the situated robotics that
I associate with the work of Rodney Brooks, and extremely interesting related
work in biologically inspired robotics. From a different angle again, although
Ashby's work from the 1930s onward has to be understood as attempting to
shed light on the brain, by the 1950s he had begun to see his cybernetics as a
general theory, applicable to all sorts of complex systems besides the brain:
adaptive autopilots, the British economy, the evolution of species.
