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could say he had gone one step beyond Masserman. Not content with simply
demonstrating that cross-conditioning could produce pathological behavior,
he had, again, produced an electromechanical model which enabled one to
grasp the go of this process at the hardware level.
It is thus revealing to think of cybernetics as a science of psychiatry, not
in the sense that it could be reduced to psychiatry—even with the tortoise it
already overflowed the bounds of the brain—but in the sense that psychiatry
was a surface of emergence (Pickering 2005b) for cybernetics: Walter's cy-
bernetics (and Ashby's) grew out of the phenomena and problematics of his
psychiatric milieu. And we can take this line of thought further in a couple
of directions. One is to note that after driving his tortoises mad, Walter cured
them (1953, 184): “When a complex learning model develops an excess of
depression or excitement, there are three ways of promoting recovery. After a
time the conflicting memories may die away—except in obsessional states. . . .
Switching off all circuits and switching on again clears all lines and provides,
as it were, a new deal for all hands. Very often it has been necessary to discon-
nect a circuit altogether—to simplify the whole arrangement.” And in case his
readers missed the point, Walter went on to analogize these electromechani-
cal procedures to those of psychiatric therapy, adding his cybernetic apologia
for the latter:
Psychiatrists also resort to these stratagems—sleep [leaving the machine alone
for a long time], shock [switching it off and on again] and surgery [discon-
necting electrical circuits within it]. To some people the first seems natural,
the second repulsive, and the third abhorrent. Everyone knows the benison of
sleep, and many have been shocked into sanity or good sense, but the notion
that a mental disorder could be put right by cutting out or isolating a part of the
brain was an innovation which roused as much indignation and dispute as any
development in mental science. There are volumes of expert testimony from
every point of view, but our simple models would indicate that, insofar as the
power to learn implies the danger of breakdown, simplification by direct attack
may well and truly arrest the accumulation of self-sustaining antagonism and
“raze out the written troubles of the brain.”
So cybernetics was a science of psychiatry in a double sense, addressing the
go of both mental disorder and psychiatric therapy and offering a legitimation
of the latter along the way. And since Walter does not use the usual terms for
the therapies he mentions, we should note that we are plunged here into the
