The Reenchantment of the World (35 page)

 

 

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
Napoleon, 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.

 

 

Clearly, continues Bateson, the result could have been avoided if the
young man had been able to confront his mother with the fact that
she became uncomfortable when he expressed affection for her. But
years of intense dependency and training, going back to a time when
he was a helpless infant, had set up a pattern that made this option
impossible. Over the years he had learned, says Bateson, that "if I am
to keep my tie to mother, I must not show her that I love her, but if I
do not show her that I love her, then I will lose her." We see in this
example a confusion of logical types. The child had learned that if he
were to maintain his relationship with his mother,

 

 

he must not discriminate accurately between orders of message. . . .
As a result [he] must systematically distort his perception of
metacommunicative signals. . . . He must deceive himself about his
own internal state in order to support mother in her deception.

 

 

There is, then, no such thing as a schizophrenic person. There is only a
schizophrenic system. The mother in such a system is in the position of
controlling the child's definitions of its own messages, and (deutero-)
teaches it a reality based on false discrimination of those messages. She
also forbids the child to use the metacommunicative level, which is
that level ordinarily used to correct our perception of messages, and
without which such normal relationships become impossible. Yet modern
psychiatry puts
the child
in the lockup, and lets the mother run
free. A strong father might be able to intervene on the child's behalf
early on,
and in an extended family even an uncle or grandparent might save the
situation. But madness has increased proportionally with the rise of
the nuclear family, and it is typically the case in schizophrenogenic
families that if the father (or the mother, if it is the man who is doing
the double binding) were to step in to support the child, he would have
to recognize the real nature of his own marriage -- a recognition that
would undo it. Schizophrenia is not a "disease but a systemic network,
a wonderland in which Alice is not free to tell the queen she is more
than a little bit looney.

 

 

How
does
one escape from the double bind, then? On the individual
level, at least, Bateson notes that the exit door is frequently
creativity. In a later (1969) reflection on the double bind, and in his
elaboration of "Learning III" in an article on "The Logical Categories of
Learning and Communication" (1971), Bateson realized that schizophrenia
was itself part of a larger system that he called the "trans-contextual
syndrome." Jokes, which often involve the scrambling of the literal and
the metaphorical, are a good example or this syndrome. They depend on a
sudden condensation of logical types, a violation of the Russell-Whitehead
theory ("A beggar told me he hadn't had a bite in three days, so I bit
him"). There is, in
fact, a double bind present in the etiology of a whole range of behavior
-- schizophrenia, humor, art, and poetry, for example -- but the theory
of the double bind does not formally distinguish between these activities
or states of mind. There is no way to say whether a particular family
will produce a clown or a schizophrenic, for example. Those whose life
is enriched by trans-contextual gifts, says Bateson, or impoverished by
them, have this in common: things are never just what they are. There
is often, or even always, a "double take" involved, a symbolic level
that distinguishes the Don Quixote from the Sancho Panza. Thus while the
patient in the hospital canteen thinks, "What can I do for you?" might
be a sexual invitation, the comedian constructs a short story or TV
situation comedy based on the very same confusion.
>>c.f., Koestler, "bisociation"

 

 

According to Bateson, the double bind is rooted in the theory of
deutero-learning; trans-contextuality is a deutero-learned "trait." In
work he did on mammalian communication in the 1960s, Bateson discovered
that one could double bind a porpoise until schizophrenic symptoms
were induced.26 For example, first teach the animal a series of tricks
(flips somersaults, etc.) and deutero-teach the context -- instrumental
reward -- by tossing it a fish every time it performs a trick. Then
raise the ante: reward comes after three tricks are executed. Finally
raise the ante to a level that assaults the entire Learning II pattern:
reward the porpoise only after it invents a completely new trick. The
creature goes through its entire repertoire, either one trick at a
time or in sets of threes, and gets no fish. It keeps doing it, getting
angrier, more vehement. Finally, it begins to go crazy, exhibit signs
of extreme frustration or pain. What happened next in this particular
experiment was completely unexpected: the porpoise's mind jumped to
a higher logical type. It somehow realized that the new rule was,
"Forget what you learned in Learning II; there is nothing sacred
about it." The animal not only invented a new trick (for which it
was immediately rewarded); it proceeded to perform four absolutely new
capers that had never before been observed in this particular species of
animal. The porpoise had become trans-contextual. it had broken through
the double bind to what Bateson calls "Learning III." In Learning III,
we literally rise to a new level of existence, and then look down and
recall, perhaps fondly, our past consciousness, fraught with what we
thought was wresolvabie contradiction. "Oh yes," we may say;
"