The Reenchantment of the World
Page 25
Here, then, is the similarity between animal communication and primary process. Like dreams and fantasy, play deals (though not exclusively) with 'relata' rather than content. The significant message in any dream lies in the relationships between the things in the dream. The image employed in the expression of the relationship is less important than the relationships themselves. Unlike secondary process, primary process cannot comment on itself directly.20 Map and territory are equated. The frame itself, as Bateson says, becomes part of the premise system; it is metacommunicative. Every fantasy, for example, includes the implied message, "This is not literally true."
Finally, we must ask: So what? So what if most of our communication violates some abstract theory of logic that was formulated in the first decade of the twentieth century? The significance lies in the fact that it is largely this violation of logic which constitutes most of our deutero-learning; that we obtain a personality, and a world view, by means of a pervasive system of cultural, metacommunicative messages that can be understood in fairly precise terms; and that in comparison to deliberate, conscious, digital knowledge, this analogue knowledge is incredibly vast. I shall return to this last point, the "principle of incompleteness," in Chapter 8. For now, it is important to understand where Bateson's investigation of learning theory took him. Whereas traditional scientific investigation scrupulously avoids any overlapping of fact and value (this, as we have seen, is the cause of its disembodied quality), Bateson deliberately merged the two, or rather, he did not force the usual artificial separation. As a result, the answer that emerged was both precise and meaningful. A person's "truth" is also his or her "character," and the patterns of formation are to be found in the modalities of nonverbal, or meta, communication.
The work that Bateson is probably best known for, his study of insanity and the formulation of the theory of the double bind as the formal etiology of schizophrenia, is in fact a brilliant elaboration, and verification, of the above theory of learning. As well as any other example we might give, this work illustrates clearly the genesis of world view and personality, and reveals the "cardiac algorithms" that underlie the process. It is a type of proof by counterexample, however, a 'reductio ad absurdum,' for madness shows what happens when the ability to metacommunicate is absent, or severely attenuated. What, Bateson asked, was being learned, or rather mis-learned, in the manufacture of madness?
Bateson's exploration of learning theory thus far had led him to the conclusion that the metacommunications system of our culture taught us how to use frames, and that their use defined personality, world view, and social sanity. It was the thesis of one of Bateson's colleagues, the psychiatrist Jay Haley, that the symptoms of madness might be due to an inability to discriminate between logical types. The individual who took metaphor for reality, who insisted, outside of church, that the wafer really was the body of Christ, was classified as psychotic. In the paper on play and fantasy, Bateson had been content to ask: "Is there any indication that certain forms of psychopathology are specifically characterized by abnormalities in the patient's handling of frames and paradoxes?" The seminal paper on the double bind, written together with Haley, Don Jackson, and John Weakland, appeared the foliowing year, and suggested an affirmative answer.
As far as Haley was concerned, the ability to distinguish between the literal and the metaphorical was the touchstone of sanity. Bateson himself points to the situation in which the schizophrenic patient comes into the hospital canteen, and the woman behind the counter says to him, "What can I do for you?" He does not reply, "I'll have the steak and kidney pie today," but instead he stands there trying to figure out what sort of a message this is. Is she offering to sleep with him? Is she trying to do him in? Is she going to give him a free lunch if he asks for it? The point, says Haley, is that all human messages violate the Theory of Logical Types. There is always an accompanying metacommunication, usually a nonverbal one, and sanity is the ability to decipher and use this code. Our patient would be correct in concluding that a sexual advance was being made if a certain tone of voice, or body language, had accompanied the woman's question, but he is unable to make such a discrimination, and it is this inability that justifies the label, "insane." Haley gives the example of a schizophrenic man who had been given ground privileges and abused them, escaping from the institution by climbing the fence surrounding it. The police finally found him and brought him back. A few days later the man showed Haley the point in the fence where he went over and said, "There's a stop sign there now." As he spoke, however, there was a twinkle in his eye. Haley suddenly realized that the patient was not being literal. Rather, he had learned to comment on his own messages, and was thus on the road to recovery.21
How does a person get to the point of constantly confusing logical types? Bateson believed that we ,should not look for some childhood trauma, some watershed event, but instead examine what was regular in the childhood of the schizophrenic. Somehow, he or she had been trained not to metacommunicate, not to comment on the messages of others, and such an inability was so aberrant that it was doubtful that one single incident could have precipitated it. In cybernetic metaphor (see Chapter 8), metacommunication is feedback, and the psychotic is like a self-correcting system that has lost its governor, endlessly spiraling into distortions labeled "catatonia," "hebephrenia," "paranoia," and so on. In fact, these distortions are alternatives to commenting on the messages of others, which for some reason the schizophrenic feels he or she must not do.
What Bateson, Haley et al. did was to investigate the entire family situation, rather than (as is still the norm) the isolated schizophrenic. Bateson and his fellow workers believed that the patient was gripped not by a "disease" mysteriously caused by genes or brain chemistry, but by a process, a pattern, that had been going on for years. As R.D. Laing, whose own work was based on the "double bind" theory, has shown, the difference between treating a schizophrenic as an "organism" emitting "signs of disease," and as a person engaged in a process, is the difference between night and day. In "The Divided Self," Laing reproduces the famous account (1905) provided by the German psychiatrist Kraepelin of the latter's presentation of a schizophrenic patient to a lecture room full of students:
The patient I will show you today has almost to be carried into the rooms, as he walks in a straddling fashion on the outside of his feet. On coming in, he throws off his slippers, sings a hymn loudly, and then cries twice (in English), "My father, my real father!." He is eighteen years old, and a pupil of the Oberrealschule (higher-grade modern-side school), tall, and rather strongly built, but with a pale complexion, on which there is very often a transient flush. The patient sits with his eyes shut, and pays no attention to his surroundings. He does not look up even when he is spoken to, but he answers beginning in a low voice, and gradually screaming louder and louder. When asked where he is, he says, "You want to know that too? I tell you who is being measured and is measured and shall be measured. I know all that, and could tell you, but I do not want to." When asked his name, he screams, "What is your name? What does he shut? He shuts his eyes. What does he hear? He does not understand; he understands not. How? Who? Where? When? What does he mean? When I tell him to look he does not look properly. You there, just look! What is it? What is the Matter? Attend; he attends not. I say, what is it, then? Why do you give me no answer? Are you getting impudent again? How can you be so impudent? I'm coming! I'll show you! You don't whore for me. You mustn't be smart either; you're an impudent, lousy fellow, such an impudent, lousy fellow I've never met with. Is he beginning again? You understand nothing at all, nothing at all; nothing at all does he understand. If you follow now, he won't follow, will not follow. Are you getting still more impudent? Are you getting impudent still more? How they attend, they do attend," and so on. At the end, he scolds in quite inarticulate sounds.
Kraepelin added the following notes to this description:
Although [the patient] undoubtedly understood all the questions, he has not given us a
single piece of useful information. His talk was . . . only a series of disconnected sentences having no relation whatever to the general situation. [Italics Laing's]
Now what is going on here? The sort of "word-salad" reproduced above is very common among schizophrenic patients, and it was Bateson's contention that since the crux of insanity was the inability to metacommunicate, such "word-salad" must contain a comment on the situation, but in a safe, that is, indirect and disguised, form. In fact, unbeknownst to Kraepelin, the patient was parodying the whole interview, and in such a way that allowed him to tell Kraepelin to fuck off: "You want to know that too? I tell you wno is being measured and is measured and shall be measured. I know all that, and could tell you, but I do not want to." "This seems," Laing comments, "to be plain enough talk. Presumably he deeply resents this form of interrogation which is being carried out before a lecture-room full of students. He probably does not see what it has to do with the things that must be deeply distressing him." Thus when Kraepelin asks him his name, he replies in a way that comments on Kraepelin's whole approach to him:
What is your name? What does he shut? He shuts his eyes. . . . Why do you give me no answer? Are you getting impudent again? You don't whore for me [i.e., says Laing, he feels that Kraepelin is objecting because he is not prepared to prostitute himself before the whole classroom of students] . . . such an impudent, shameless, miserable, lousy fellow I've never met with.22
From Laing's point of view, Kraepelin is something of a dolt. At another point, Laing relates the story of the patient who was similarly contemptuous of his psychiatrist but was afraid to confront him. Instead, he told him that he heard voices, and when asked what they were saying, looked directly at the doctor and replied: "You are a fool." The psychiatrist busily wrote it down in his note pad.
The question is, why metacommunicate in such an arcane way? Why didn't the boy simply turn to Kraepelin and say, "I object to being treated like a performing bear. Please leave me alone"? Even if Kraepelin had been capable of hearing such a statement, the patient would not have been constitutionally capable of making it, for he had undoubtedly been dealt with by people like Kraepelin all his life. His family situation was probably such as to rule out any overt metacommunication. Hence, word-salad, "validating" Kraepelin's diagnosis. Bateson's hypothesis was that this word-salad was descriptive of an ongoing traumatic situation that involved a tangle in metacommunication, and that this ongoing trauma "must have had formal structure in the sense that multiple logical types were played against each other. . . ." A visit to the home of one of Bateson's own patients, for example, revealed that the patient's mother was constantly, and without any apparent awareness, taking the messages received from the people around her (Bateson included) and reclassifying them to mean something else. The patient undoubtedly had to endure such behavior since infancy. But it was he, rather than she, who was judged insane, because it was she, rather than he, who ran the household, and who presumably obtained her husband's support or acquiescence. By the time the son was old enough to say, "That's not what I meant; you are misunderstanding me," he was totally unable to do so. What developed instead was an array of bizarre symptoms.
The researches of Bateson and his fellow workers tended to support the general hypothesis that in the psychology of real communications, the Theory of Logical Types (the discontinuity between a class and its members) was constantly being breached. They found that schizophrenia was the result of certain formal patterns of this breaching occurring, in an extreme form, in the communication between mother and child. Of course, metacommunication can always be falsified: the false laugh, the artificial smile. But most typically, as in the above example of mother and son, the falsification was done unconsoously. Like Mrs. Malaprop, the mother was unaware that she was getting everything scrambled, but in this case the consequences were not quite so humorous. At this point in the analysis of schizophrenia, Bateson's theory of deutero-learning became relevant. The son had been deutero-trained into a schizophrenic reality; he had learned to construct reality this way in order to survive. Given this ethos, insanity had become his "character" and world view. But there had to be more to it than that. This was only the beginning of an explanation; what Bateson was seeking was a full-fledged scientific understanding of the phenomenon.
In New Guinea, Bateson had grasped the ethos of the Iatmul, at least in part, through the concept of schismogenesis. Did schizophrenia also have such formal structure, and if so, what was it? What did Learning II consist of, for psychotic individuals? The "road through the mystery of species," William Bateson had written in 1894, "may be found in the facts of symmetry."23 What was the symmetry in this case? What was me underlying pattern, the cardiac algorithm? The schizophrenic child, wrote Bateson et al., lives in a world in which sequences of events are such that unconventional habits of communication are in some sense logical. "The hypothesis which we offer," the authors continued, "is that sequences of this kind in the external experience of the patient are responsible for the inner conflicts of Logical Typing. For such unresolvable sequences of experiences, we use the term 'double bind.'" Bateson identified the ingredients of a double-bind situation as follows:
(1) Two or more persons must be involved, one of whom is forced to play the role of victim.
(2) The double-bind structure goes on repeatedly. It is not a matter of some great traumatic shock, but of a regular and habitual way of experiencing the world.
(3) There is a primary negative injunction, either of the form, "Do not do X, or I will punish you," or "If you do not do X, I will punish you." Again, the punishment is not a key traumatic event, but an ongoing one, such as withdrawal of love or expression of abandonment.
(4) There is a "secondary injunction conflicting with the first at a more abstract level, and like the first enforced by punishments or signals which threaten survival." Here is the confusion of logical types. The secondary injunction is usually (meta)communicated by kinesic signals. The parent, for example, might punish the child, and then display a body language that says "Do not see this as punishment," "Do not see me as the punishing agent," or even, "Do not submit to this." In acute forms of schizophrenia, parents do not have to be present anymore. "The pattern of conflicting injunctions may," says Bateson, "even be taken over by hallucinatory voices."24
(5) However, the double bind is not merely a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. In and of itself, a no-win situation cannot drive someone crazy. The crucial element is not being able to leave the field, or point out the contradiction; and children often find themselves in just such a situation. Thus Laing sums up the double-bind predicament as: "Rule A: Don't. Rule A.1: Rule A does not exist. Rule A.2: Do not discuss the existence or nonexistence of Rules A, A.1, or A.2."25
What happens to a child caught in such a situation? Clearly, he will have to falsify his own feelings, convince himself that he really doesn't have a case, in order to main- tain the relationship with his mother or father. In formal terms, "he will have to (deutero-) learn not to discriminate between logical types, because it is just such discrimination that will threaten the whole relationship. In other words, (a) he is in an intense relationship, hence feels he must know what messages are being communicated to him; (b) the person doing the communicating is sending two messages of different orders of abstraction, and using one to deny the other; and (c) the victim cannot metacommunicate, cannot comment on this contradiction. Such contradictions become "reality," and over time the child may learn to metacomrnunicate by means of the most fantastic metaphors. The metaphorical and the literal become permanently confused, and the metaphorical is safer since it avoids direct comment and so does not put the victim on the spot. If the patient finally decides he is Napoleon, he is perfectly safe, because he has effectively accomplished what was previously not possible: he has left the field. The double bind cannot work any longer, because it is no longer he who is present, but "Napoleon." This is not, however, a game; if survival depends on being N
apoleon, the victim will not be aware he is talking in metaphors, or that he is really not the historical Napoleon. Madness is not so simply the breakdown of the psyche. It is, in actual fact, an attempt to salvage the psyche.
Double-bind situations abound in psychopathology, and Bateson gives as a classic example the case of a visit made by a mother to her hospitalized son, who was recovering from a recent episode of acute schizophrenia.
He was glad to see her [writes Bateson] and impulsively put his arm around her shoulders, whereupon she stiffened. He withdrew his ann and she asked, "Don't you love me any more?" He then blushed, and she said, "Dear, you must not be so easily embarrassed and afraid of your feelings." The patient was able to stay with her only a few minutes more and following her departure he assaulted a[n] orderly and was put in the tubs.