Gregory Bateson

Gregory Bateson (May 9, 1904 to July 4, 1980) was an English anthropologist, social scientist, and systems theorist whose work crossed anthropology, psychiatry, biology, and communication theory. The youngest son of the Cambridge geneticist William Bateson, who had coined the word "genetics," he was born in Grantchester, near Cambridge, and educated at Charterhouse and St John's College, Cambridge, taking a degree in biology in 1925 before turning to anthropology. He conducted fieldwork in New Guinea and Bali, was married to the anthropologist Margaret Mead, was one of the core participants in the Macy Conferences that founded cybernetics, formulated the double-bind theory of schizophrenia, spent his last years at the Esalen Institute, and collected his essays in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (1979). He died at the San Francisco Zen Center on July 4, 1980.¹²

Naven and the Iatmul

Between 1929 and 1933 Bateson carried out fieldwork in the Sepik River region of the Territory of New Guinea among the Iatmul people, focusing on the naven, an elaborate ceremony in which relatives enacted ritualized role reversals and transvestism to mark a young person's first accomplishments. He published his analysis as Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View in 1936. The book was an unconventional and reflexive study that examined the same body of ritual through ethos, eidos, and social structure and questioned the act of ethnographic description itself.¹³

In Naven Bateson introduced the concept of schismogenesis, the process by which interaction between individuals or groups becomes progressively differentiated through cumulative feedback, which he divided into symmetrical schismogenesis, where each side escalates the same behavior such as boasting or rivalry, and complementary schismogenesis, where the behaviors are opposed and mutually reinforcing such as dominance and submission. The idea of self-reinforcing cycles of interaction anticipated the feedback concepts he would later take up in cybernetics and apply to family systems.³⁴

Bali and Margaret Mead

Bateson married Margaret Mead in 1936, and from 1936 to 1939 the two conducted joint fieldwork in Bali, pioneering the systematic use of still photography and film as primary ethnographic data rather than illustration. They took some twenty-five thousand photographs and produced Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (1942), in which images were arranged in sequenced plates to convey patterns of child-rearing, posture, trance, and emotional life that prose alone could not capture. The collaboration also yielded a series of ethnographic films including Trance and Dance in Bali.¹⁵

Bateson and Mead had one daughter, the anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, born in 1939. The couple separated in the 1940s and divorced in 1950, but their intellectual partnership shaped both careers, and Mead drew Bateson into the wartime and postwar American scientific circles, including the group around the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, in which the new science of feedback and communication was being assembled.²⁵

The Macy Conferences and Cybernetics

Bateson was one of the core members of the Macy Conferences on cybernetics, the series of interdisciplinary meetings held in New York from 1946 to 1953 under the chairmanship of Warren McCulloch that brought together Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, Mead, Heinz von Foerster, and others to build a general theory of control and communication in animals and machines. Bateson and Mead were the conferences' principal anthropologists, and Bateson became one of the most active in pressing the group to apply concepts of feedback, information, and circular causality to human relationships, learning, and culture.⁶²

The cybernetic framework reoriented Bateson's thinking for the rest of his career. He came to treat mind not as a thing located inside a skull but as a pattern of relationships and information distributed across a system of differences, an idea he summarized in the formulation that information is "a difference which makes a difference." Feedback, recursion, and the logical typing of messages drawn from the Macy discussions became the conceptual tools he carried into his study of communication, psychiatry, and evolution.⁶⁷

The Double-Bind Theory

After the Second World War Bateson moved to California and drifted out of mainstream anthropology into the study of communication and psychiatry. Working at the Veterans Administration hospital in Palo Alto, he led a research project with Jay Haley, John Weakland, and the psychiatrist Don D. Jackson that produced the paper "Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia," published in Behavioral Science in 1956. The paper advanced the double-bind theory, which held that schizophrenic symptoms could arise within patterns of family communication in which a person repeatedly receives contradictory messages on different logical levels and is unable to comment on the contradiction or to escape the relationship.⁸⁹

In the classic double bind a primary injunction conflicts with a secondary injunction at a higher level of abstraction, often verbal warmth contradicted by nonverbal hostility, while a third, tertiary injunction prevents the victim from leaving the field or naming the trap. Bateson framed the theory in terms of Bertrand Russell's theory of logical types, treating the pathology as a disorder of the capacity to discriminate the levels of a message rather than as a purely biochemical disease. The double-bind work made Bateson a major figure in the development of family therapy and the systemic schools of psychotherapy that grew out of the Palo Alto group.⁸⁹

Steps to an Ecology of Mind and Mind and Nature

Steps to an Ecology of Mind, published in 1972, collected three decades of Bateson's essays and lectures across anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, epistemology, and what he called the ecology of mind, and it brought his thinking to the wide countercultural audience that had begun reading him in the late 1960s. The volume gathered the schismogenesis work, the double-bind papers, his writing on play, learning, and communication among animals, and his arguments about the cybernetic structure of mind, presenting them as steps toward a unified science of pattern and relationship.⁷¹⁰

In Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (1979) Bateson attempted a synthesis of the ideas, arguing that the same formal patterns of organization, what he called the pattern which connects, run through biological evolution and through mental process, and that mind and living nature obey a common logic of difference, coding, and recursive structure. He had been diagnosed with cancer in 1978 and worked on the book and its unfinished sequel, Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred, completed after his death by Mary Catherine Bateson, during his final years.⁷¹¹

The Esalen Years

Bateson became a scholar-in-residence at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur from 1978 until his death in 1980, lecturing, leading seminars, and living on the property while he worked on Mind and Nature. He had been a presence in the institute's intellectual life for years, and his cybernetic conception of mind and his ecological epistemology became part of the framework of the Human Potential movement that had grown up around Michael Murphy and Dick Price. His writings were also taken up by Stewart Brand, who excerpted Bateson in the Whole Earth Catalog and the CoEvolution Quarterly and helped carry the ecology-of-mind idea into the San Francisco Bay Area technology culture.¹¹¹²

Bateson held an appointment as a Regents lecturer and later a member of the Board of Regents of the University of California, to which Governor Jerry Brown appointed him in 1976. He died on July 4, 1980, at the guest house of the San Francisco Zen Center at the age of seventy-six.¹¹¹