The Mixed Legacy of Gregory Bateson

Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) was a British anthropologist who worked in New Guinea and in Bali with his wife, Margaret Mead. After World War II, he became interested in schizophrenia and studied alcoholic veterans with various mental disorders in California. He also made contributions to family therapy, arguing that distorted communications were responsible for many personal problems. Later, he investigated dolphin and octopus learning and wrote about ecological issues. Many of his papers are collected in his Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972).

My only personal encounter with this unusual man was a lunch in San Francisco during the mid-1970s at an anthropology conference. Bateson was witty and charmed my wife. I mentioned that I had been his daughter’s teaching assistant at Harvard and that I had brief contact with Dr. Mead in connection with my anthology, Culture Shock (1970). We probably discussed his book, Naven (1958), and his ideas about ecology.

In this article, I am primarily concerned with the relation of

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psychoanalysis to Bateson’s writings on anthropology and psychiatry. In both fields, his point of view seems to come down to “a failure of communication.” I believe his concepts of “schismogenesis” and the “double bind,” require supplement by methods of depth psychology. Much of his work denies unconscious processes, and I think he regularly ignored obvious ambivalence.

In Naven, Bateson analyzed a Melanesian initiation ritual involving cross-dressing by adults. His interpretation of social processes that make people behave in similar or complementary ways (“schismogenesis”) later invoked cybernetic feedback. Personally, I find more convincing the dynamic mechanisms described by Bruno Bettelheim in Symbolic Wounds (1962). He found male envy of female anatomy and reproductive capacity at the base of many initiation rituals, including those invented by disturbed children. The Naven ceremony itself clearly expresses ambivalence of men toward women and of the mother’s brother toward his sister’s son—as the male initiators are called “mothers” in this Iatmul tribal ritual in New Guinea.

In the second edition, Bateson writes, “Naven was written almost without benefit of Freud” (1958, p. 252). In an article on Bateson, anthropologist Charles Nuckolls focuses on the word “almost,” pointing out many similarities with Freud’s handling of emotion (“The Misplaced Legacy of Gregory Bateson: Toward a Cultural Dialectic of Knowledge and Desire,” Cultural Anthropology 10: 3, 1995, pp. 367-394). I, on the other hand, am more curious about the phrase “without benefit of,” which is commonly completed by the word “clergy.” This wording may allude to a family drama involving Mead’s second husband Reo Fortune, whom she abandoned for Gregory. After her divorce from Fortune, Bateson and Mead were married in Singapore.

Bateson’s concept of the “double bind” changed over time but always involved an insoluble problem due to faulty communication leading to more or less serious mental illness, including schizophrenia. It seems that the usual definition of a dilemma, as a situation involving choice between equally unsatisfactory alternatives, includes the notion. In a classic double bind, a person is punished for trying to escape a painful situation. I would interpret these as intrapsychic conflicts existing between parts of the psyche.

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Charles Nuckolls suggests that a “dialectic” is also involved in schizophrenic communication. Nuckolls considers Bateson’s “legacy” in two chapters of his fine book The Cultural Dialectics of Knowledge and Desire (1996).

What “About Bateson”?

In Rollo May’s collection of articles About Bateson (1977) the authors included students, friends, and family (Margaret Mead and their daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson). May wrote about Bateson’s influence on “humanistic psychology” while others treated related topics. Margaret, Gregory, and “Cathy” had formed a lasting alliance, surrounded by admiring colleagues and students as their interests went from topic to topic and conference to conference.

In several chapters in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson, 1972), Cathy is cast as the “Daughter” who questions “Daddy” in (semi-fictional) “metalogues” wherein Gregory expounds his changing views of learning, ecology, and religion. Bateson’s subsequent marriage to Betty Summer included fathering another daughter and adopting a stepson. Toward the end of his life, he married Lois Cammack and had another daughter. His interest in psychiatry seems not to include study of his own conflicts.

Gregory’s own “family drama” cast him as son of a famous biologist and survivor of two older brothers, one killed in World War I, the other by suicide. His dominant father (who named him after Gregor Mendel) promoted genetics but rejected Darwinian evolution. He tried to steer his surviving son into the natural sciences, but Gregory rebelled. According to his daughter, he was also hostile toward his mother and “heartily wanted to get away” from her (Mary Catherine Bateson, With a Daughter’s Eye, 1984, p. 59). His professional relationship with Mead continued for decades after their 1950 divorce and through his two later marriages.

Bateson’s account of his own (brief) analysis (ca. 1950) seems quite peculiar. He later told David Lipset:

When I was undergoing what was vaguely called my psychoanalysis, I had a dream [that] I have committed a sin…And because I am guilty, I am condemned and taken to the place of execution where [I

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make] a very noble speech…at the end of the speech I bow, and I say, ‘Excuse me if I dramatize myself a little,’ and wake up roaring with laughter [No interpretation follows] (Gregory Bateson, 1980, p. 176).

Watts About Bateson

After short postwar positions, including a difficult year teaching at Harvard, Bateson landed in California in 1949 to head a project about “paradoxes in psychotherapy” and other forms of communication. His work involved therapists and people as different as Jurgen Reusch, Norbert Wiener, and Alan Watts, whose mystical views he admired.

Priest and Asian scholar Alan Watts clearly had interactions with Bateson during the Big Sur California years of Esalen Institute and Zen. In Nature, Man and Woman (1970, p. 100) Watts calls the double bind “a contradiction of the specially intolerable type… wherein all the alternatives offered are forbidden.” This is an unusually clear statement; however, from his Buddhist standpoint, it can also be part of a healing process, for “finding himself in the double-bind predicament where every road is closed… [he may find] the sensation that every road is open” (Alan Watts, 1970, p. 181). Watts says that this is the main function of the puzzling koan that Zen masters set to their pupils, opening them to new modes of awareness. He also likens this state to “the type of awareness which Freud considered essential for psychoanalysis” (p. 183).

The article, “The Cybernetics of Self: A Theory of Alcoholism,” was based on Bateson’s work from 1949 to 1952 with patients at the Veterans Administration hospital in Palo Alto (Psychiatry, 1971, 34, pp. 1-18). Though he confesses that “I fear I that I helped them not at all,” he continued that “the theology (sic) of Alcoholics Anonymous coincides closely with the epistemology of cybernetics” and went on to examine the Twelve Steps in terms of experiences such as “alcoholic pride” and “hitting bottom.” His one reference to psychoanalytic theory is to the early work of another friend, Erik Erikson. If Bateson ever had a drinking problem, I found no mention of it.

What About Bateson Today?

It is difficult to determine the influence of Bateson’s ideas

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in contemporary science. He often had problems communicating with students and peers, and his quest for a “metaempistemolgy” seems futile. Yet there is great stimulation to be found in his attempts to rethink fundamental problems, and his final book, Mind and Nature, a Necessary Unity (1979), published just before his death, was written to be understandable by those who had not read his earlier works.

My mixed feelings are probably evident in this essay. How different is the “double bind” from other types of dilemmas? Does cybernetic theory really shed light on social processes and individual pathology? Without insisting on the truth of Freudian dynamics, does Bateson’s apparent denial of conflict theory weaken his claims?

Samuel Roll, a practicing psychotherapist, confirmed my opinion that Bateson’s influence on that field was a quickly passing phenomenon. Roll said that, like Gestalt Therapy, which flourished at that time, Bateson’s work “left no body of research that is currently important” (personal communication). In his treatise, Culture in Mind, anthropologist Bradd Shore takes up Bateson’s several useful discussions of “play” as paradoxical communication (1996, pp. 111-114) and as different from “ritual” (pp. 90-91).

He also mentions Bateson’s analysis of photos and films, and his ideas about “digital cognition,” but Shore did not integrate these ideas into his discussions of “the problem of meaning.” My opinion is that, today, Bateson would be most at home with ecological awareness groups such as the Bioneers, attending and organizing conferences on the relationships among natural and social processes, provoking thought and insisting on the central importance of communication, while pointing out paradoxes and contradictions in the speech and writing of other scholars. I’m sure we need people like him.

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