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Second, it is interesting to ask where this line of first-generation cybernetic
psychiatry went. The answer is: nowhere. In Britain, Walter and Ashby were
the leading theorists of mental pathology and therapy in the forties and fifties,
with their models offering a new understanding of the brain, madness, and its
treatment, but histories of twentieth-century psychiatry give them hardly a
mention (try Valenstein 1986 and Shorter 1997). And one can think of several
reasons why this should be. The first takes us back to the sheer oddity of cyber-
netics. Walter remained to a significant degree an outsider to psychiatry in his
specifically cybernetic work, and it was also the case that Walter's cybernet-
ics made little constructive contribution to psychiatric therapy—it offered an
explanation of the mechanisms of ECT and lobotomy without suggesting new
therapeutic approaches. Again, one might imagine that Walter had got as far
as he could with CORA. It is not clear what his next step might have been in
developing this line of research further, or where he could have found support
for what would probably have been a significant engineering effort.
But beyond all that, we need to think about two broader developments
bearing on psychiatry as a clinical field. The first was the introduction in the
1950s of psychoactive drugs that proved effective in controlling the symptoms
of mental disorder, beginning with chlorpromazine (Shorter 1997, chap. 7;
Rose 2003). These drugs had their own unfortunate side effects but did not
entail the violence and irreversibility of lobotomy, which went into rapid de-
cline in the mid-1950s. ECT enjoyed a longer history, up to the present, but its
use also declined in the face of drugs, and the technique lost its cutting-edge,
if I can say that, status as the most advanced form of psychiatric therapy.
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Cybernetics was thus left high and dry in the later 1950s, as a science of clini-
cal practices which were, if not entirely extinct, at least less prevalent than
they had been in the 1940s. It is hardly surprising, then, that Walter found
other lines of research more attractive from the mid-1950s onward. Ashby
continued developing his own cybernetics as a science of psychiatry into the
later 1950s, but, as we shall see, he too abandoned his psychiatrically oriented
research from around 1960.
The other development we need to think about here is a growing critique
in the 1950s of violent psychiatric therapies and even of the use of antipsy-
chotic drugs, a critique which burst into popular consciousness in the 1960s
as what was often called the antipsychiatry movement. This movement was
not, despite the name, pure critique. It entailed a different way of conceptual-
izing and acting upon mental disorders, which was, as it happens, itself cyber-
netic. This gets us back to Bateson and Laing, and on to chapter 5.
