Bateson developed his analytic of the radical disorientation attendant to “difficulties at the metalevel” while working with patients diagnosed as schizophrenic in a Palo Alto hospital in the 1950s. This research project famously led to the double bind hypothesis (Bateson et al. 1972; Chaney 2017: 45-63). According to this hypothesis, the schizophrenic’s condition originated in one particular, human variant of the (logical) “paradoxes of abstraction” that pervade and constantly find their way into “the mental process and communicative habits of mammals” at large (1972: 180). Such paradoxes arise from condensation and contradiction within the hierarchy of “levels” or “modes” of communication on which depends the possibility to know, precisely, “what kind of message a message is”. For a message to be interpreted felicitously, it must me accompanied by a metamessage — another, and one degree more abstract, “class of information” (1979: 115) — labeling the message as, for instance, literal, metaphoric, playful, humorous, dead serious, ritualistic, fiction etc. One ordinary example of paradox of abstraction, then, would be a message (say, “take me into your arms”), framed or reframed by a metasignal (the speaker’s body stiffens as she receives the hug she requested just moments earlier) that casts uncertainty onto whether and how the message was meant (1972: 217). Bateson wrote elsewhere and often of the pain (and even of the “extreme pain”) that can be inflicted on humans (and on dogs, and on dolphins) through exposing them to such paradoxes (e.g. 1972: 241-2, 246, 278, 478, 1979: 118-123). For him, withdrawal from linguistic and bodily communication (catatonia), flight into distrustful, delusional interpretation (paranoia), or into disorganized thought and discourse crammed with unlabeled metaphors (hebephrenia, “word salad”) were not adequately described as symptoms of a mental disorder ascribable to (or locatable in) a bounded self. Rather, they were adaptive dispositions, acquired or learned in a dynamic dialog with a larger life environment, and “in some sense appropriate” (1972: 206) to dampen the repeated experience of the pain generated by paradoxes of abstraction. Those dispositions or “unconventional communicative habits” were particularly prone to develop when a young human grew up within an early communication system (typically, amongst close kin) in which routine contradictions or lack of clarity in the labeling of exchanged messages made it extraordinarily difficult for her to know what sort of message was being communicated — while, at the same time, any interpretation exposed her to rebuke or punishment for being unsound. The accumulated effect of such “unresolvable sequences of experiences” (ibid.) could be a breakdown, rather than development, of the child’s communicative system, a learned incapacity to discriminate “what sort of message a message is” (including for interpreting the messages internal to her own thought and emotional processes), and withdrawal or flight into one form or the other of psychic seclusion. One may well remember here Arendt’s formulation of worldliness as a material-semiotic horizon ahead of us, for example, her claim that “with word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance” (1958). While Bateson himself does not use this language, the victim of the double bind was, perhaps, forced or kept in his analysis into a form of worldlessness.

Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 1979. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: E.P. Dutton.

Bateson, Gregory, Don D. Jackson, Jay Haley, and John H. Weakland. 1972. “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia.” In Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology, 201–27. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chaney, Anthony. 2017. Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.