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simply straighten that person out psychiatrically is very small. And if one
adds in Bateson's later idea of psychosis as a voyage with an adaptive course to
run, then such interventions appear entirely counterproductive—“hindering
and even exacerbating circumstances during the progress of the psychosis”
(Bateson 1961, xvi)—which simply leave sufferers stuck in their double binds
without any possibility of escape.
Already in the early 1950s Bateson echoed Harry Stack Sullivan's critique
of “mechanistic thinking which saw [man] so heavily determined by his in-
ternal psychological structure that he could be easily manipulated by pressing
the appropriate buttons.” In contrast, Bateson favored
the Sullivanian doctrine [which] places the therapeutic interview on a hu-
man level, defining it as a significant meeting between two human beings. . . .
If . . . we look at the same Sullivanian doctrine of interaction with the eyes of a
mathematician or circuit engineer, we find it to be precisely the theory which
emerges as appropriate when we proceed from the fact that the two-person
system has circularity. From the formal, circularistic point of view no such in-
teractive system can be totally determined by any of its parts: neither person
can effectively manipulate the other. In fact, not only humanism but also rigor-
ous communications theory leads to the same conclusion. (Ruesch and Bateson
1951, quoted by Heims 1991, 150)
Adumbrated here, then, is a symmetric version of cybernetic psychiatry, in
which the therapist as well as the patient appears within the frame, more
or less on the same plane as each other, as part of a continuing process that
neither can control.
11
But still, just what should this process look like? The
most enduring legacy of Batesonian psychiatry is family therapy, in which the
therapist enters into the communication patterns of families and tries to help
them unravel double binds (Lipset 1980; Harries-Jones 1995). Bateson's own
favored approach seems to have been simply an unstructured and open-ended
engagement with sufferers—chatting, eating together, playing golf (Lipset
1980, chap. 12).
12
More on this when we get to Laing.
A S N O M A D
untIl the publIcatIon of
StepS
[bateson 1972], gregory must have
gIven the ImpressIon, even to hIs strongest admIrers, of takIng up
and then abandonIng a serIes of dIfferent dIscIplInes; sometImes he
must have felt he had faIled In dIscIplIne after dIscIplIne. lackIng
