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There is more to be said about Bateson, but this is as far as we need to go in
exploring his cybernetic understanding of schizophrenia. In this passage he
arrives at an image of the schizophrenic as an exceedingly complex system, in
Stafford Beer's terms—a system with its own dynamics, with which one can
possibly interfere but which one cannot control, “a voyage of discovery . . .
largely steered by endogenous process.” From one perspective, the model
for the voyage could be the homeostat or DAMS or one of Stuart Kauffman's
simulations of gene networks, but Bateson alluded instead to richer and more
substantive referents: initiation ceremonies and alchemy (the motif of death
and rebirth). Schizophrenia and recovery appear here as a sort of
gymnastics
of the soul
, as Foucault might have said—a plunge beyond the modern self,
precipitated by adaptation to double binds, with psychosis as a higher level of
adaptation that returns to a transformed self.
T H E R A P Y
we do not lIve In the sort of unIverse In whIch sImple lIneal control
Is possIble. lIfe Is not lIke that.
GreGory Bateson,
“conscIous purpose versus nature” (1968, 47)
At this point it would be appropriate to move from psychiatric theory to
practice, but since Laing and his colleagues went further than Bateson in
that direction, much of this discussion can be postponed for a while. What
I should emphasize here is that Bateson's understanding of schizophrenia
hung together with a principled critique of orthodox psychiatry, and this gets
us back to the fork in the road where Bateson and Laing split off from Ashby
and Walter. Just as one can think of relations within the family on the model
of interacting homeostats all searching for some sort of joint equilibrium, one
can also think of relations between sufferers and psychiatrists on that model.
Ashby, of course, thought of the psychiatric encounter asymmetrically, as a
site where the psychiatrist used electric shocks or surgery to try to jolt the
patient back into normality. Bateson, instead, thought such an approach was
worse than useless. Implicit in the notion of the self as an exceedingly com-
plex system is the idea that it is not subject to any sort of determinate, linear
control. One can impinge on the dynamics of the self as one can impinge on
the dynamics of a homeostat, but not with any determinate outcome. From
this perspective, the chance that blasting someone's brain with current would
