by Tim Parks
In 1970 Edith Farnsworth hazarded:
The waiting lasts a long time, my dream
Of you has not yet found its end.
It often seems translations tell us more about poetic sensibility in our own language than in the original. What about:
and still I don’t know who’ll be eating whom
when I get to the table. Time is long,
I’m not through dreaming of you yet.
Unlocking the Minds Manacles
[Gregory Bateson and Valeria Ugazio]
The paths by which one mind may come to influence another are curious indeed. Thus a new book by Italian psychologist Valeria Ugazio exploring the family backgrounds of those suffering from phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorders and anorexia begins by drawing on observations made by the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson during his work among the Iatmul Indians of New Guinea in the late 1920s. Behind both authors the anti-conformist inspiration of the English poet William Blake is frequently apparent, while between them lies the rise and fall of one of the most controversial adventures in psychotherapy, the so-called ‘systemic approach’.
Bateson was born in 1904 into a family with a history of scientific controversy. His father William, a distinguished naturalist, was responsible for giving the study of genetics its name and was both translator and vociferous champion of Mendel’s work on hybrids and heredity. Gregory was named after the Austrian monk, no doubt with the hope that he would follow in his footsteps. Ironically, while Bateson never sought to belittle the study of genetics, his legacy has been to stress the importance of the social environment in activating, or not, the potential available in any individual’s genetic make-up.
Explaining to his disappointed father that he was giving up zoology for the relatively new subject of anthropology, Bateson spoke of his need for a break with ordinary impersonal science’. He had grown up in a house where Blake’s pictures hung on the walls, where art and poetry were revered as the acme of human achievement yet at the same time considered ‘scarcely in the reach of people like ourselves’. Gregory’s elder brother, Martin, who aspired to become a poet rather than a scientist, argued bitterly with his father and eventually killed himself in a scenario that might have been invented to demonstrate the limitations of ‘ordinary impersonal science’. Infatuated with a girl who never gave him the slightest hope, he shot himself by the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus, a suicide note and a poem in his pocket.
Although in her book Storie permesse, storie proibite (Stories allowed, stories forbidden), Valeria Ugazio draws only on Bateson’s ideas and not his biography, one can’t help feeling its relevance to her thesis. Her title is that the way family members talk about themselves and others, giving particular importance to certain qualities and achievements, will make some “life stories’ (or ways of seeing one’s life as narrative) available to a child while denying the possibility of certain others. Clearly, after his brother’s suicide, an artist’s life was a ‘story forbidden’ to Gregory. On the other hand it was the achievement to which his family attached the greatest value, and there can be no doubt that they were ambitious for their son. His choice of anthropology and its specifically, as he always insisted, ‘human’ element, can be seen as a way of combining the scientific and artistic and hence resolving the particular career conundrum his parents had created for him. Significantly, on the opening page of his first book, Naven, Bateson would be reflecting on the advantages of a novelist’s eye when it came to describing a foreign culture.
The artist … can leave a great many of the most fundamental aspects of culture to be picked up not from his actual words, but from his emphasis. He can … group and stress [words] so that the reader almost unconsciously receives information which is not explicit in the sentences and which the artist would find it hard - almost impossible - to express in analytic terms. This impressionistic technique is utterly foreign to the methods of science.
At once it was clear that Bateson’s project was to grasp, as an artist might, a sense of the wholeness and interrelatedness of a culture, rather than to report particular facts. But family background demanded that this be done in a scientific way. It’s not surprising, then, that his second project, in Bali, undertaken with his wife Margaret Mead, was the first to make systematic use of photographs in an ethnographic study. True to his resistance to the analytic and reductive, it was important that the photographs not be seen separately: Bateson wrote of the book that came out of his work in Bali,
In this monograph we are attempting a new method of stating the intangible relationships among different types of culturally standardized behaviour by placing side by side mutually relevant photographs. Pieces of behaviour, spatially and con-textually separated - a trance dancer being carried in a procession, a man looking up at an airplane, a servant greeting his master in a play, the painting of a dream - may all be relevant to a single discussion; the same emotional thread may run through them.
In the late twenties when Bateson began his career, British anthropology was dominated by the figure of A.R. Radcliffe-Brown who was fond of describing societies using the analogy of the organism. The life of a people was to be viewed as an active system of functionally consistent, interdependent elements where social phenomena ‘are not the immediate result of the nature of individual human beings, but are the result of the social structure by which they are united’.
Though he originally found it exciting, Bateson had a number of objections to this view. He felt its stress on the functional was reductive and left no space for the aesthetic; it also suggested that there was no tension between the ‘interdependent elements’ of the society, and, related to that, it deduced all individual behaviour from social structure in a suffocating determinism, to which Bateson with his own family experience, must have felt an instinctive repulsion. It was in opposition to this that he developed the first of the ideas for which he will be remembered, his so-called ‘schismogenesis’.
Bateson had been observing the radically different behaviour patterns of men and women among the Iatmul Indians. The more the men were exhibitionist and boastful, the more the women were quiet and contemplative. It was clear that the one behaviour pattern stimulated the other in a process that led to strong personality differentiation within an overall group ethos. The process of reciprocally stimulated personality differentiation, schismogenesis, could be complementary or symmetrical. Among the Iatmul men the process is symmetrical: they are involved in a dynamic of escalating competition, each seeking to outdo the other. Between the men and women of the tribe, however, the process is complementary, each becoming ever more the opposite of the other.
Schismogenesis, as Bateson saw it, was a powerful process and could be damaging, not only because it tended to violent extremes, but also because it could deny an individual any experience outside that promoted by this social dynamic. Bateson called his book Naven because this was the name of the bizarre series of rituals which he saw as ‘correcting’ the schismogenetic process and guaranteeing stability. In these ceremonies men dressed up as women and vice versa. The women now assumed, with great excitement and relief, what was the traditional behaviour of the men while the men were abject and passive, even submitting to simulated rape.
What Bateson was suggesting, then, was a complex process of interaction, which did not deny the possibility of individual behaviour, but nevertheless saw it as taking place within a social process underwritten by a fundamentally conservative tendency that would always seek to counterbalance any movement away from the norm. Bateson had not heard of the word cybernetics when he formulated these ideas, but when he learnt of the concepts of feedback and closed self-corrective circuits, it was evident that this would offer him an analogy that could substitute for Radcliffe-Brown’s unitary organism.
Almost twenty years after Bateson’s death, Ugazio, who lectures in psychology at the University of Turin, approaches schismogenesis with the same combination of respect and dissatisfaction that Ba
teson brought to Radcliffe-Brown. Bateson had expected that complementary and symmetrical schismogenesis would be found in personal relationships, in cases of psychological disorder, in contacts between cultures and in political rivalries. Hence there is nothing revolutionary in Ugazio’s considering the process as essential to personality development within the family, or suggesting that character is formed by how people place themselves in relation to others in a group. But what Bateson did not do is speak of the ‘content of a process of schismogenesis. For Ugazio, on the contrary, this is essential. Reciprocal differentiation between family members, she claims, takes place along lines of meaning, or ‘semantic polarities’.
Consider, for example, a family that tends to talk about itself and others in terms of the polarity ‘dependence-independence:
Family conversations will tend to be organized around episodes where fear and courage, the need for protection and the desire for exploration play a central role. It is within this critical semantic dimension that schismogenetic processes will take place. As a result of these processes, the members of these families will feel and define themselves as shy and cautious, or, on the contrary, courageous perhaps even rash; they will find companions who are willing to protect them or alternatively in need of protection […] Admiration, contempt, conflict, suffering, alliances, love and hate will all occur around the themes of dependence/independence. In these families there will be some who - like the agoraphobic - are so dependent and so in need of protection as to require that someone be beside them in even the most ordinary day-to-day situations. But there will also be some members of the family who, on the opposite side of the polarity, provide examples of extreme independence.
Every family, Ugazio maintains, will ‘converse’ and thus ‘compose itself around a number of semantic polarities. The family mentioned above, for example, might also talk about themselves and others in terms of winners and losers, or generosity and meanness. Nevertheless, one polarity will tend to dominate. The position a child assumes along that critical line will be crucial for the formation of his or her personality.
Ugazio’s second addition to Bateson’s theory of schismogenesis is her insistence on the importance of what she calls “the median position’. Bateson had seen the complementary and symmetrical processes he described as necessarily leading to extremes, but in a fascinating reconsideration of Naven, Ugazio draws attention to a number of men Bateson mentions only in passing who do not engage in male theatricals, nor become part of the admiring audience. In the general schismogenetic process, there will be some, Ugazio claims, who react by insistently readjusting their position this way and that in response to the excesses of those on either side of them. In certain polarities, independence/dependence for example, such a process might be positive, approaching a golden mean, but in others it could lead to all kinds of anxiety. For where the dominating polarity is saintly self-denial against ‘evil’ self-indulgence, there is little middle ground to be had. Here, a child seeking a median position in an already established play of opposites, is likely to find himself oscillating between a pleasurable indulgence that arouses guilt and a virtuous denial that provokes a sense of yearning and loss. Again, Bateson’s own background would have provided Ugazio with a good example. David Lipset’s biography of the anthropologist gives us an adolescent who determinedly sought out a median position between his ‘poetic’ brother Martin and ‘scientific’ father William. In a scenario where poetry was considered an indulgence legitimate only for the most gifted and science a self-denying crusade to further human knowledge, an equilibrium was hard to find, as Bateson’s frequent feelings of guilt when embarking on his first anthropological projects suggest. His lifelong obsession with mechanisms of self-adjustment, transforming, as it were, his personal difficulties into his science, would seem to confirm this reading, which also allows apparently minor details of his working methods to take on unexpected meaning. Talking about Bateson’s research on schizophrenia at the Palo Alto Veteran’s Hospital, Lipset remarks:
Although the project’s interstitial position between disciplines and between institutions had meant a degree of financial insecurity, Bateson often remarked that he protected his scientific freedom in this way, sheltering it under ‘three umbrellas’. His project was housed in a hospital, was funded by grants from independent agencies, and these were administered through the Anthropology Department at Stanford University. ‘When you have three bosses,’ he was fond of saying, ‘you have none.’ Each institution maintained that the other was supervising. Or, as one of Bateson’s colleagues remarked ‘Nobody knew what the hell he was doing.’
Well, what the hell was a British anthropologist doing in the psychiatric ward of a California hospital? It’s a question to which Ugazio addresses herself at length, and one whose answer will bring us to her own most important innovation in Storie permesse.
Fascinated by the relationship between his own work and the fast developing communications theory, Bateson accepted an invitation to join a study of ‘human communication in psychotherapy’. It was a period when he immersed himself in both the harsh realities of psychiatric medicine and the theoretical complexities of ‘digital and ‘analogic’ forms of communication in verbal and non-verbal speech, developing the idea that all messages imply a hierarchy whereby one element - perhaps literal meaning - is placed in context by another - perhaps body language. The latter allows the recipient to contextualise the former. It was out of this area of study that his most famous concept, the idea of the double bind, was developed.
Bateson was working with schizophrenics, who frequently fail to appreciate the sense in which a message is to be understood. A routine question from a waitress - ‘How can I help you?’ - might be understood as a sexual proposition and elicit a most inappropriate response. Or again, to be told by the same girl that a dish on the menu is not available might be contextualised as part of an elaborate international conspiracy and lead to an angry scene. Rather than looking for the cause of this disturbance in the isolated or traumatised psyche (as psychoanalysis tends to do), or in a specific organic dysfunction (as traditional medicine demands), Bateson suggested that the schizophrenic has rather ‘learned’ to ‘live in a universe where the sequences of events are such that his unconventional habits of communication will be … appropriate’. His disorder, that is, is part of a larger system.
What were these ‘sequences of events’ and the system they implied? We can imagine a child who from birth receives contradictory messages from the figure most involved in his upbringing, usually the mother: the content perhaps seductive, but the body language discouraging, or vice versa. Bateson’s example of such behaviour in the paper ‘Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia’ (1956) has often been quoted: a young man recovering from an acute schizophrenic episode was visited in the hospital by his mother.
He was glad to see her and impulsively put his arm around her shoulders, whereupon she stiffened. He withdrew his arm 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 an aide.
The example is followed by a two-page analysis in which Bateson remarks, among other things, on the fact that the schizophrenic’s apparent state of subjection does not allow him to comment on his mother’s contradictory behaviour. She rejects affection, demands affection, then criticises her son for an inhibition she herself has just induced. Ultimately, Bateson claims, the patient is up against the impossible dilemma: 'If I wish to maintain my relationship with my mother, I mustn’t show her that I love her, but if I don’t show her I love her, I’ll lose her.’
Bateson maintained that a lifetime of such behaviour would induce a structural trauma, as if the mind were constantly put before conundrums of the variety ‘All statements on this page are false’. Faced with this ‘double bind’, the child himself begins to communicate in t
he same way, wildly dissociating verbal and non-verbal communication, literal and metaphorical levels. As a result, conversations with a schizophrenic can often follow the pattern of a bizarre series of non sequiturs where the ‘normal’ party to the dialogue frequently suspects that he is being made fun of.
It would be hard to exaggerate the enthusiasm which Bateson’s double bind aroused. For those in psychotherapy who had begun to suspect the limitations of an exasperated delving into the individual psyche, the idea that a mental illness was part of a system of communication and might thus be treated by altering the way people operated together, rather than dealing with them individually, was extremely exciting. No complex histories need be elicited, no insight painstakingly imparted. All you had to do was change their behaviour in such a way that the schizophrenic response was no longer ‘appropriate.
A school of therapy rapidly developed which involved getting a whole family together to be interviewed by one or two therapists while others watched, taped and even filmed the session through a one-way mirror. After discussion at the end of the session, members of the family would be ordered to perform some task or follow some instruction designed to alter the way they behaved together. A hyperactive, domineering mother, for example, might be ordered to spend a month in bed. In 1975, reviewing a crop of books published on the back of the movement, Elsa First remarked in the New York Review of Books that: ‘Many in the family therapy movement prefer to think of themselves as anthropological consultants to very small tribes in distress, rather than as doctors who cure individual “cases’ of psychological illness.
Yet all was not well. As Ugazio points out, Bateson soon realised that the connection of his theory of a special kind of communication problem - the double bind - to an illness as complex and intractable as schizophrenia had been a mistake. The theory didnt suggest why one member of the family was affected rather than another, it didnt explain the difference between the pre-schizophrenic and the schizophrenic, or why some double binds might be damaging and others, as Bateson believed, therapeutic. But the worst blow to the theory came in 1966 when the original members of Batesons team were invited to consider material presented to them by psychiatric patients and their parents and to pronounce on any eventual double binds. Faced with numerous accounts and audiotapes of family conversations, their disagreement was complete. Apparently, they had no criteria for identifying what was a double bind and what was not.