ASCAP Dec 1992 Vol 5 No 12 p 4-7
Bateson and evolutionary biology
I've just been reading the Festschrift for
Gregory Bateson (1) and was interested to read that ethology was a major
influence on Bateson's research group in the decade starting 1952. In a chapter
headed "One thing leads to another" (pp 43-64) John H. Weakland
(Department of Psychiatry, Stanford University) says of their approach to
schizophrenia: "In getting into
this, somehow or other, we were looking at all these things from a natural history,
ecological approach. We used this
viewpoint partly because both Bateson and I came out of anthropology,
and partly because somehow we'd gotten into reading Lorenz and Tinbergen on
animal ethology".
If we
accept that family therapy developed out of Bateson's group, then its birth
depended on two coincidences. One was
that Chester Barnard, then head of the Rockefeller Foundation, had read
Bateson's Naven (2) about his work with the Iatmul in New Guinea (in
which he starts to wrestle with the ideas of symmetrical and complementary
relationships) and so provided funds for what would otherwise have been such a
vague project as to be unfundable (its title being "The Significance of
the Paradoxes of Abstraction in Communication"); the other was that premises happened
to be found for them in the Veterans Administration Hospital in Menlo Park
(near Palo Alto) where there was no shortage of schizophrenic patients -
otherwise these two anthropologists might never have got involved with
psychiatry and the double bind might never have been formulated. They were joined by two psychiatrists, Bill
Fry who was just starting out, and Don Jackson, who had been practising in
The
title of the Festschrift is a quotation from Bateson: "(as each year passes) we shall know a
little more by dint of rigor and imagination, the two great contraries of
mental process, either of which by itself is
lethal. Rigor alone is paralytic death,
but imagination alone is insanity".
Here
is another quote, from a chapter entitled "Forming warm ideas" (pp
65-81) by Arthur P. Bochner: "The
only common denominator among imaginative theorists seems to be artful
dodging". (!)
Bochner (then an Associate Professor of Speech at
BATESON'S RULES OF THUMB
1. Study
life in its natural setting being careful not to destroy the historical and
interactional integrity of the whole setting.
2. Think
aesthetically. Visualise, analogise,
compare. Look for patterns,
configurations, figures in the rug.
3. Live
with your data. Be a detective. Mull, contemplate, inspect. Think about, through, and beyond.
4. Don't
be controlled by dogmatic formalisms about how to theorise and research. Avoid the dualisms announced and pronounced
as maximums (sic) by particularising methodologists and theorists. (They'll fire their shots at you one way or
the other anyhow).
5. Be as precise as possible but don't close off possibilities.
Look to the ever larger systems and configurations for your explanations. Keep your explanations as close to your data
and experience as possible.
6. Aim
for catalytic conceptualisations; warm ideas are contagious......by warm
ideas I mean ideas that compel us to move closer to our subject matter; ideas from which we can cast new rays of
insight, open up new lines of thought, extend our territory into new avenues of
enquiry, and amplify our understanding beyond what we knew before.
And Bochner urges:
1. Scientific
activity is recursive. To see
phenomena a scientist
must transform them; having transformed
them, he or she is transformed by them.
2. Data cannot tell us what to ask of them,
nor what they mean. This
suggests that the meaning of data is never beyond challenge, never closed to
other meanings, never capable of absolutely falsifying or verifying. What we do to and/or with data is an
intellectual activity.
3. Ideas
are as important as facts and nowhere is it evident
that they are inducible from them (facts).
We need imagination not rules; intuition not technique; warm ideas not cold facts. Particularly in the social sciences where the
entire question of measurability of phenomena and lawfulness of behaviour is so
troublesome, what we need is inventive people not conformists, fertile thinking
not rigid rules to follow.
Finally, a chapter by W.B.Pearce, L.M.Harris and V.E.Cronen (from the
Department of Communication Studies,
"the development of a close personal
relationship may be described as a movement from employing episodes as the
context for defining the relationship to the evolution of relationship concept
that forms the context for assigning meaning to episodes" (p166). They make a rather incomplete attempt to make
a classification of episodes, describing enigmatic episodes, episodes
characterised by unwanted, repetitive patterns and episodes of value-expressing
ritual. They do not include episodes of
agonic interaction in their list, but they do in fact give a case history of a
married couple in whom there is a cyclical pattern of "conflict"
episodes (about their level of closeness) followed by "confrontation"
episodes which feature "self-disclosure, validation and acceptance in
which they try to eliminate the conflict episode". They point out that the pattern of interaction
is the same as one described by the Bateson group, in which there is a cycle of
intrusiveness and withdrawal, punctuated by the intruder as intrusiveness
caused by the other's withdrawal, and by the withdrawer as withdrawal caused by
the other's intrusiveness. This is a
case of a switch into the agonic mode due to conflict over the definition of
the relationship on Birtchnell's horizontal axis of closeness/distance, another
example of the complex interaction of attachment and agonistic behaviour. The same group describes elsewhere another
example of switching from mode to mode, mentioned in my contribution to the World
Futures symposium.
Before leaving the paper by Pearce et al., I should mention their
splendid double-bind in which Jan says to Dave, "I want you to make me
more assertive". They use a lot of
algebra which I find incomprehensible, but the text makes sense without
it. They are very concerned with logical
levels (one reason for their affinity with the
The
volume also contains an important paper by L.Edna Rogers (at the Department of
Communication,
Since
1.
Bateson's research group at
2. The
Mental Research Institute, founded by Don Jackson in 1958, ?
still going.
3. The
Brief Therapy Centre, a subdivision of the Mental Research Institute, whose
work is described in "Tactics of Change" (3).
In a
final chapter entitled "The charm of the scout" (pp 357-368) Stephen
Toulmin (Professor of Social Thought and Philosophy at the University of
Chicago) likens Bateson to an American Frontier Scout, "leaving the safety
of the settlement and reappearing unpredictability, bringing a mixture of
firsthand reports, rumors and warnings about the wilderness ahead - together
with a tantalizing collection of plant specimens, animal skins, and rock
samples....". He also likens him
to Francis Galton - neither of them got a PhD or held a tenured university
post, and so were able to cross disciplinary
boundaries without constraint.
"...all of his notable contributions to science have sprung from
his habit of viewing the mental life and behavior of creatures as functional,
adaptive activities that need to be intelligently related to their evolutionary
history and habitat."
References
1.
Wilder-Mott, C. & Weakland, J.H. (eds) (1981) Rigor and Imagination: Essays from the
Legacy of Gregory Bateson.
2.
Bateson, G. (1937) Naven. Stanford:
3. Fisch
R, Weakland JH, Segal L. (1982) The tactics of change:
doing therapy briefly.
4.
Berger, M.M. (ed) (1978) Beyond the Double
Bind: Communication and Family Systems,
Theories, and Techniques with Schizophrenics
Bateson, G. (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind.