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use of ECT in Britain in 1939 and the first prefrontal leucotomy in 1940 (Coo-
per and Bird 1989). And Walter was very much involved in these achievements.
His technical skill and creativity were such that he had a standing relationship
with the Ediswan Company in the development of commercial apparatus, and
Britain's first commercial ECT machine was developed by Ediswan and car-
ried on the title page of its brochure the statement that it was built “to the
specification of Mr. Grey Walter” (fig. 3.11).
51
Walter was one of the authors of
the first three papers to appear from the Burden on ECT. The earliest of these
appeared in the
Lancet
in December 1939 (Fleming, Golla, and Walter 1939),
describes ECT as EEG in reverse, and includes EEG readings of two post-ECT
patients.
52
During World War II Walter himself performed ECT treatments on
American soldiers suffering from “battle fatigue.”
53
Walter's interest in mental pathologies and therapies was thus by no means
that of a detached observer, and if one wanted to identify the worldly matrix
from which his cybernetics emerged, it would have to be psychiatry; more
specifically the psychiatry of the great and desperate cures; and more specifi-
cally still the world of electroshock, electroconvulsive therapy, ECT.
54
Two remarks to end this section. In chapter 1 I said that it was interesting to
think of cybernetics as one of Deleuze and Guattari's “nomad sciences” that
destabilize the state, and we can come back to that thought now. Earlier in
the present chapter I described the nomadic wandering of Walter's cybernet-
ics through inter- and antidisciplinary worlds such as the Ratio Club and the
Namur conferences, and yet when it came to real-world psychiatry Walter's
work was evidently no threat to the established order. What should we make
of this? The obvious remark is that Walter's cybernetics was adjusted to his
professional career in a double way: its radical aspects flourished outside
psychiatry's gates, and within those gates it was domesticated to conform to
the status quo. There is no need to be cynical about this: in the forties and
early fifties it was possible to be optimistic about the great and desperate psy-
chiatric cures (compared with what had gone before), and there is no reason
to doubt that Walter (and Ashby) were genuinely optimistic. Nevertheless, we
can also see how ontology and sociology were correlated here. As will become
clearer in chapter 5 when we discuss Bateson and Laing, it was possible to go
much further than Walter in developing the cybernetic theme of adaptation in
psychiatry, but the price of this was a transformation of the social relations of
doctors and patients that did, in a Deleuzian fashion, threaten the established
order.
