Gregory Bateson (1904–1980): a reappraisal
Brian Stagoll
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 2005; 39:1036–1045
This year marks the centenary of Gregory Bateson’s
birth.
Bateson, multiply described as a biologist, anthropolo-
gist, cybernetic theorist and natural philosopher, remains
an elusive but remarkable figure. To some he was a great
cross-disciplinary thinker who profoundly affected their
thinking about psychiatry, yet to others he was an obscure
guru whose books are now deservedly out of print.
Bateson led a peripatetic life, never settling into a disci-
pline or a tenured position. His writing is often dismissed
as too abstract or mystical. His best known theory in psy-
chiatry, the Double Bind Theory of Schizophrenia [1],
is now often regarded as unable to establish any empir-
ical base, a piece of junk science. Bateson died in 1980
at the San Francisco Zen Centre, having spent his last
years at the Esalen Institute, California, as a ‘scholar-in-
residence’. His last work and grand summation ‘Mind
and Nature’ [2] was denounced by a Times Literary Sup-
plement reviewer as ‘coming from the intellectual lotus
land of California where eclectic theories and mystical
philosophies are as thick as the LA smog’ [3].
Yet, especially after his 1972 book ‘Steps to an Ecol-
ogy of Mind’ [4], he was a hero to many, drawn to
his vision of a ‘Science of Mind and Order’. Bateson’s
vision challenged the reductionism, materialism and
dualism of Western Science. Instead, he proposed a
new philosophic stance (or ‘epistemology’) of cyber-
netic circularity, sacred unity and ecologic awareness
with everything connected in a great hierarchically or-
dered class of integrative processes he eventually called
‘mind’. In recent listings of the books most influential
to them in psychiatry both Helm Stierlin [5] and George
Szmukler [6] cite Bateson. Chris Beels calls ‘Steps’ ‘the
Brian Stagoll
579A Brunswick Street, North Fitzroy, Victoria 3068, Australia.
Email: bstagoll@vicnet.net.au
Received 22 November 2004; accepted 22 November 2004.
fundamental text of the invisible university to which my
generation of social therapists belonged’ [7].
So, what is Bateson’s legacy? Was he the great theoreti-
cal scientist of the last century whose lessons are yet to be
learnt? Or was he a marginal figure of fashion, now lost
in the bleak history of unstrung psychiatric theorizing?
To approach this question, we shall adopt a Batesonian
method, spelling out the contexts of his life and ideas, and
linking them to the fundamental questions he explored.
In Bateson’s famous words, we shall try to find in his life
‘the pattern that connects’.
Early life: Cambridge, Mendel and zoology
Bateson was born in Grantchester in 1904, into the
intellectual aristocracy of Edwardian England [8]. His
paternal grandfather, William Henry, was the Master of
St. Johns College, Cambridge, a liberal reformer of uni-
versity traditions. Bateson’s father William had founded
the immensely influential Cambridge School of Genet-
ics. In 1900, William had come across Gregor Mendel’s
previously unknown 1865 experiments on cross-breeding
peas. He instantly recognized their significance and be-
came ‘Mendel’s apostle’, introducing Mendelian ideas to
the English-speaking scientific world.
It was at a time when Darwinian theory had reached
an impasse. The natural selection of species proposed by
Darwin in 1859 used a model of ‘blending inheritance’.
But Darwin was hard pressed to explain why a trait, once
selected, was then not blended away in future genera-
tions. Blending could not account for the diversity of
inherited factors. The puzzle was solved with the recog-
nition of ‘Mendelian factors’ (soon known as genes),
‘particles’ that preserved their identity across genera-
tions without becoming diluted [9]. The (re)discovery
of Mendel was the vital breakthrough. William Bateson
wrote: ‘only those who remember the utter darkness be-
fore the Mendelian dawn can appreciate what happened’
 B. STAGOLL
[10]. He named his third son Gregory after Mendel, and
coined the term ‘Genetics’. Yet later William became
maligned as an ‘anti-Darwinist’ and has been marginal-
ized in the history of genetics. He was never convinced
that natural selection based on the model of one gene –
one characteristic (‘genetic atomism’) could fully explain
evolutionary change. He vigorously opposed the biomet-
ric, statistical approach that based evolution on the accu-
mulation of small, continuous variations, believing this
could not account for the discontinuous variations found
in species. William was trained in embryology, and al-
ways sought to show lawful pattern and regularity, form
and symmetry in species. The degree of organization re-
quired for the development of an adult organism could
not be generated by single genes alone. William did not
think the genes in chromosomes were so central: there
must be more to it. A rancorous debate continued, not re-
solved for many years. But contemporary genomics vin-
dicates Bateson. Chromosomes are the site of genes, but
genes move readily between chromosomes, and chromo-
somes are not directly causal of individual development:
interactions with the environment are also significant
[11].
But William Bateson died defeated. At the end of his
life, he told Gregory that it was a mistake to have com-
mitted his life to Mendelism, a blind alley [10].
William’s positions foreshadow many of the patterns of
Gregory’s life: the advocacy of new ideas; the fascination
with the morphology of form and pattern; the rejection
of individual genetic determinism for models of interac-
tional and ecologic lawfulness; the embrace of mental as
well as physical factors in evolutionary history.
Gregory’s childhood was ‘in the middle of natural his-
tory and beetle collecting’ [12]. His forceful parents
were confirmed atheists, but William insisted that his
sons would not grow up into ‘empty-headed atheists’
and the Bible was read at breakfast, along with William
Blake. Gregory had two older brothers. Both were to die
tragically, which marked him all his life [7].
Breaking away to the Pacific
Like his father, Bateson gained a First in Zoology
at Cambridge. His first publication was in collabora-
tion with William, on genetic variations in Red Legged
Partridges [13]. Like any young English gentleman
would, Gregory went on an expedition to the Galapagos,
but turned away from zoology. ‘The most interesting
fauna was the people in the world’ [8]. He was moving
away from Cambridge towards the Pacific Rim, where he
would live in various places for the rest of his life. It was a
time when the first glittering generation of field workers
1037
led by W.H. Pitts Rivers and A.C. Haddon at Cambridge
were putting anthropology on to the intellectual stage,
and Bateson came under the influence of his Cambridge
peer A.R. Radcliffe-Brown. Brown, who established
the Chair of Social Anthropology in Sydney, saw so-
cieties as functionally analogous to organisms. Bateson
commenced field work in New Britain, and the Sepik
River in New Guinea. For a short time lived in Sydney,
lecturing on Pacific languages in Brown’s department.
Returning to the Sepik in 1931, he struggled: ‘hopelessly
sick of field work. My belly is full of travelling and poking
my nose into the affairs of other races’ [8]. Dissatisfied
with the poverty of anthropologic theory of the time, he
could not find a unifying theme among the disconnected
scraps of data that field work offered.
Around this time he met Margaret Mead, beginning
their remarkable partnerships [14]. She was enchanted
by how English biologists think: ‘they would pick up
illustrations right across the field. One minute from em-
bryology, the next from geology, the next from anthropol-
ogy, back and forth, very freely, so that the illustrations
from one spot illuminated, corrected and expanded the
one from another’ [14, p.173].
Bateson had intense conversations in New Guinea with
Mead and her husband Reo Fortune. Revitalized he re-
turned to England: ‘If you’re out in the tropics and you
have a major idea, the thing to do is pack up and come
home’ [14, p.165].
The major idea was incorporated into Naven [15].
Bateson described his book as ‘experiments in thinking:
a study of the ways data can be fitted together’. It was
the beginning of his epistemologic and cybernetic explo-
rations. As a book it is, as Bateson acknowledges, ‘rather
unreadable’. The Naven is an elaborate ritual performed
by the Iatmul, a headhunting people in the middle reaches
of the Sepik River. The ritual involves transvestism, mock
homosexuality and dramatic reversals of behaviour. Mak-
ing sense of a weird ritual was the classic sort of problem
anthropologists took on. Bateson took several years to
construct his ethnographic picture. In the end, he ex-
plained the Naven as an elaborate dance that dealt with
tensions between kinship groups in a very patrilineal
culture.
In Naven, Bateson was developing his critique of induc-
tion, the generalizing and universalizing from particular
data, as the basis of science. Bateson rejected induction:
rather he saw his project like an artist, trying to grasp the
wholeness and inter-relatedness of a culture, rather than
exploring particular facts. He was interested in something
beyond description of raw data or middle-range analysis.
Why, he asked, did he portray the patterns of culture
the way he did? He was the observer observing him-
self, while resisting accepted methodologies and category
1038 GREGORY BATESON (1904–1980)

systems. Instead, he advocated a combination of ‘strict
and loose thinking’ [4, p.75] that ‘lead me into wild
hunches and at the same time compelled me into more
formal thinking about those hunches, a double habit of
mind’. This did not make him popular with his anthro-
pologic colleagues. Naven was dismissed as ‘precocious
metatheoretical introspection’ [7], and ‘with too many
personal elements to be called without qualification,
scientific’ [16].
Schismogenesis, Margaret Mead and Bali
Naven did propose a process which became known as
Bateson’s first major idea: schismogenesis. This occurs
when cumulative interactions between two distinct but
related groups lead to more extreme or sharply differen-
tiated patterns than would otherwise have occurred. In
symmetrical schismogenesis, each of the groups tries to
outdo the other, for example, in domination or boasting.
In complementary schismogenesis, a reciprocal relation-
ship becomes more one-sided or more one-down, one-up,
for example, display-spectatorship. These such formal
patterns of interaction that can be seen at any level of
relationship, for example, marriages, international rela-
tions and arms races. Bateson proposed that the Naven
ritual was a cybernetic governor that stopped symmetri-
cal schismogenesis from going into runaway and mutual
destruction [15]. The details of Naven are perhaps not that
important, but the idea of schismogenesis has wide ap-
plication, an example of the fundamental pattern Bateson
was always looking for.
But if British social anthropology did not appreciate
Bateson, with his critique of induction and his advocacy
of ‘strict and loose thinking’, Margaret Mead certainly
did.
Mead and Bateson married on the way to Bali in 1936,
Bateson correcting the proofs of Naven on their honey-
moon [14, p.173].1 In Bali, they were funded to study cul-
tural aspects of ‘dementia praecox’. The Balinese were
given to trances, and by Western standards were out of
touch with reality in ways Western psychiatry might de-
fine as schizophrenia, or so the argument went. What
conditions of child raising in the culture might create the
propensity for engaging in trances? Bateson and Mead
were captivated by the vividness of Balinese life. They
pioneered visual anthropology with the systematic use of
photographs. Bateson developed an astounding 25 000
still photos, all thoroughly annotated by Mead. Their
elegant book, Balinese Character: A Photographic Anal-
ysis, has never been surpassed [17].
This book gives a glimpse of Bateson’s aesthetic sense.
R.D. Laing commented: ‘he had the most distinctive per-
ceptual capacities of anyone I’ve met . . .’ [18, p.21].
As for the origins of the trance, Bateson’s photos did
show a pattern in Balinese children of intense arousal
then frustration by parental figures. Mead and Bateson
speculated that the ‘schizoid’ withdrawal into vacancy
and away from activity they observed in Balinese men
was an effect of this childhood training in arousal and
frustration. Bateson also noted that schismogenic inter-
actions were much less common in Bali than in the Iatmul.
Instead, interactions were muted and static, and did not
reach climax. ‘Culture-and-personality’ anthropology as
practised by Mead and Bateson is now rather dated, but
as Geertz notes, their observations of the Balinese were
‘unmatched by any of us’ [19, p.4].
World War II
Returning to New York at the outbreak of World War II,
Bateson went on to England, but returned when his
daughter Mary Catherine was born [20].
During the war he worked for the Office of Strategic
Services, the forerunner of the CIA. Of this time Bateson
said: ‘It was two dully wasted years in India and Ceylon
trying to introduce a few anthropological ideas into U.S.
intelligence, relieved by fieldwork in Lower Burma’. Af-
terwards, he was consistently negative about his wartime
experiences, and damning of applied anthropology in
Intelligence Services.
However, a recent paper on the role of anthropologists
in Intelligence Services, based on freedom of informa-
tion data from Washington, shows Bateson to have been
very committed and brave, indeed decorated [21]. His war
work involved the introduction of misinformation, and at-
tempts to generate schismogenesis in enemy patterns of
communications. It is not clear how successful this was at
the time, but certainly these propaganda tactics were later
used by the CIA. Bateson maintained his CIA connec-
tions, including his participation in the 1950s experiments
with LSD at Stanford [22]. Bateson did what was asked
of him during the war. After all he had a brother who had
died in World War I. But later he clearly regretted it, and
was suspicious of large organizations for the rest of his
life.

1
Post-war cybernetics
Mead later said their marriage was ‘an incomparable model of what
anthropological fieldwork can be like, even if the model includes the
kind of extra intensity in which a lifetime is condensed into a few short Post-war Bateson became a founding member of
years’ (p.176). an extraordinary cross-disciplinary group ‘the Macy
 B. STAGOLL
Conferences on Cybernetics’. This was a group of mathe-
maticians and social scientists who explored the applica-
tions of the new ideas of cybernetics, information theory
and digital computers coming out of wartime research
[23]. It was a time of both great hope and Cold War para-
noia. Bateson’s interest was an extension of his work in
cultural anthropology on how social systems organize and
stabilize. He saw the possibility of the new cybernetics
offering the precision of mathematics to these processes.
Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, became his
mentor in the vocabulary of computers, formal logic and
communication theory. Wiener had solved the wartime
problem of anti-aircraft artillery control, by working out
the mathematics of guidance and control systems based
on feedback. Wiener coined the term ‘cybernetics’, Greek
for ‘steersman’ [24]. Machines (like organisms) received
input and, in turn, produced output (behaviour). When
output circled around to become input, the machine ac-
quired a means for responding to the effects of its own
behaviour. ‘Output’ becoming ‘input’ gave the machine
a way of developing a purposeful ‘mentality’, as feed-
back advanced the machine to a goal. Feedback loops
are abstract patterns of relationships. They are embed-
ded in physical structures or living organisms but can be
formally distinguished from the actual physical structure.
In terms of formal patterns, a machine and an organism
are equivalent. Feedback was a general pattern of life, or
more precisely ‘mind’, an idea Bateson would develop
over the rest of his life [25].
Cybernetic ideas were sufficiently general to provide
a vocabulary that could unify biological and social sci-
ences in a new paradigm of information that focused on
form, pattern and circularity (rather than reductive, lin-
ear energy mechanisms). Information, ‘the difference that
makes a difference’, was the foundation. Bateson was not
a mathematician, and his dislike for engineering is well
documented. His tool was the English language and he
used mathematical and logical concepts as metaphors to
formulate his conceptual schemes. But he could claim
to be a founder of cybernetics. He was a key figure
at the Macy Conferences who would also become the
most trenchant critic of the mechanistic and determinist
drift of cybernetics in later years [26].
For Bateson, cybernetics became the explanatory
epistemology for all communicative systems found in
nature. Once the cybernetic rules of coupling and com-
munication were understood, then the Cartesian dualisms
of subject and object (or mind and matter, or nature and
culture) could be dispensed with. It was no longer nec-
essary to banish the Ghost from the Machine. Instead, it
was realized even machines had ‘a mind’: the Ghost and
the Machine were one. The ‘ancient superstition’ of the
mind–body split was resolved, at least for Bateson.
1039
Psychiatry, alcoholism, non-verbal
communication
In the late 1940s, separated from Margaret Mead, and
failing to be rehired at Harvard amid rumours that it
was because he advocated all anthropologists should be
psychoanalysed [8], Bateson moved to San Franciso.
Here, he became more officially affiliated with psychi-
atry. Working at the Langley Porter Clinic with Jurgen
Ruesch, he researched psychotherapy, or as he put it ‘the
nature of communication among a tribe called psychi-
atrists’. Bateson worked ethnographically, taping inter-
views, jotting notes and lecturing. He was stimulating to
some, but puzzling to most. Psychiatric residents would
complain ‘Bateson knows something which he does not
tell you’ [8, p.196].
He worked with alcoholics, later the subject of his
great essay ‘The Cybernetics of Self: A Theory of Alco-
holism’, on how the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anony-
mous (AA) coincides with a cybernetic epistemology [4].
It is the ‘false pride’ of the alcoholic that he can ‘beat the
bottle’ that results in a recurrent symmetrical battle for
control that leads to further drinking. The AA model
proposes that attaining such control is impossible. Alco-
holics Anonymous accepts a complementary position to
the bottle: ‘I can’t control it, I can’t drink, it will kill me’.
Accepting there is a ‘greater power’ leads, by the Twelve
Steps, to a new epistemology, a cybernetic one, that al-
lows change and acceptance to occur at deeper levels.
The cycle of addiction and control is thus broken and the
‘self’ is reorganized as attempts for conscious control are
given up. The AA example was later used by Bateson as
a metaphor for the logic of error in much larger domains.
He argued, for example, that the addictive patterns of con-
sumption in industrial civilization are fed by false beliefs
that managerial and technologic solutions can always be
found to control ecologic degradation. What is needed
instead is a reorganization of Western thinking about re-
lations with the environment that recognizes such control
is not possible, just as the alcoholic lets go of the addictive
idea that ‘he can beat the bottle’. For Bateson, we are part
of nature. It is not something we can beat or overcome
[27]. Bateson, quoting the Bible, says ‘[The Ecologic]
God is not mocked’.
Bateson also studied non-verbal communication in
families and the role of paralanguage and gestural –
kinesic exchanges in regulating behaviour and qualify-
ing meanings [27]. Later he was to claim: ‘We made a
film in ’49 at the Langley Porter Clinic of the fact that
minor patterns of (non-verbal) exchange are the major
sources of mental illness. And nobody in ’49 could look
at the film; the professionals could just not see it’ [28].
His theoretical book with Ruesch ‘Communication, the
1040 GREGORY BATESON (1904–1980)
Social Matrix of Psychiatry’ received much the same
mute reception [29]. It was a proposal for cybernetic cir-
cular models of information as the foundation of psychi-
atric theory. It foreshadowed later ideas of how systems
of communication are constructed out of patterns of in-
teraction. The book was also a critique of tendencies in
conventional psychiatry to reify abstractions into defini-
tions of pathology, often based on materialistic psychic
energy models (like Libido Theory). The book foreshad-
owed social constructionism as way of overcoming the
split between social (external) and psychological (inter-
nal) models of behaviour, but in 1951 it was too radical
to be understood.
Logical typing and the paradoxes of abstraction
One concept developed in the book was the idea of ana-
logic and digital coding. This idea had first been proposed
by von Neumann at a Macy Conference. In this ‘informa-
tion age’, it is now commonplace, but it was novel then.
A signal is digital if it differs sharply or is discontinu-
ous from the external events it represents; an analogic
signal has a shape or continuity related to the subject
matter it represents. Bateson argued linguistic behaviour
is digital, while body language tends to be analogic. Hu-
man communication occurs simultaneously along both
channels. The relation between these two channels of
communication could be understood by applying another
analogy from logic, the Russell–Whitehead Theory of
Logical Types [30]. Put simply, Bateson argued that ana-
logic communication was of a higher level, or logical
type than digital. One qualified, or provided the context
for the other.
This is a central Batesonian insight, perhaps his most
important one: that a vertical classification is the essen-
tial component in the ordering of communication. We
must always look for and classify the levels of any com-
munication. Not to do this is to invite confusion and
paradox. In ‘Principia Mathematica’, Russell had pro-
posed there is always a discontinuity between a class and
its members, a hierarchical gap. For example, the class of
machinery is of a higher logical type or level of abstrac-
tion than a member like typewriters or tape recorders.
When a class is mistaken for a member logical paradoxes
can occur. The classic example is the famous paradox pre-
sented by the Cretan who says ‘All Cretans are liars’. (If
this is true, its not true etc.) This contains both a statement,
and a statement about the statement, the second being of
a different level of abstraction from the first. Principia
Mathematica forbade such conflations of different hierar-
chical levels in logic and insisted on markers, subscripts,
quotation marks, etc. to indicate the levels. But in nature
it is not so precise. Breaches of logical typing, of con-
fusion of levels, are always occurring. Digital messages
(e.g. verbal reports) are accompanied by analogic ges-
tures (e.g. non-verbal commands), but these messages are
at different levels, one being a metacomment on the other.
When these levels are denied or confused, for example,
when literal (digital) messages are disqualified by ges-
tural (analogic) messages, contradictions will arise and
paradoxes generated, with behavioural consequences.
Such thinking became the basis for Bateson’s next
project, titled ‘The Paradoxes of Abstraction in Commu-
nication’. He was aiming to sort out the levels and logical
classes used in the social sciences. And so the famous
(and infamous) Double Bind Theory of Schizophrenia
[1] was generated.
Double binds and schizophrenia
Looking back it must be said that the Double Bind
theory must be a candidate for both the most generative
and the most misunderstood theory in psychiatry.
Bateson assembled a team, the Palo Alto group, all of
whom later rose to prominence in family therapy, includ-
ing Jay Haley, John Weakland and Don Jackson. Accord-
ing to Haley, they struggled for a long time ‘with how
‘paradoxes of abstraction’ were relevant to anything in
human life’ [1]. Bateson believed in naturalistic obser-
vation, but even more in deduction. From observation of
thought disorder in schizophrenic subjects, Haley pro-
posed that schizophrenic ‘word salad’ as an example of
failing to separate the logical levels between literal and
metaphoric statements. Such misreadings led to strange
phenomena as the apocryphal patient who ‘ate the menu
when he was hungry’. Bateson was trying to discover
the context which could make such unintelligible be-
haviour intelligible, just as he had with the Iatmul. Dur-
ing a trip to New York, he speculated with Wiener that
a telephone system might be termed ‘schizophrenic’ if
it took numbers mentioned in the conversation between
subscribers for those numbers which represent the names
of subscribers [8]. The hypothetical idea of a learning
context which created paradoxical confusions was de-
veloped. ‘What contexts generate confusions in logical
typing between communicants, and what will be the
effects?’
The Palo Alto group argued deductively that the uncon-
ventional habits of thought seen in schizophrenia were the
effects of certain contexts: thought disorder was part of
a larger system. The name the group gave to contexts
carrying such confusions was ‘the double bind’.
Soon the famous paper ‘Towards a Theory of
Schizophrenia’ was published [31]. Bateson always
 B. STAGOLL
thought it had been hurried into publication. The long
deductive arguments were cut by the editors, leaving
the impression the authors were generalizing from case
studies [26]. This was not the case.
In its original formulation, the paper defined the nec-
essary ingredients of the Double Bind as:
1 two or more persons;
2 repeated experience;
3 a primary negative injunction;
4 a secondary negative injunction conflicting with the
first at a more abstract level;
5 a tertiary negative injunction prohibiting the victim
from leaving the field; and
6 the complete set no longer necessary when the victim
has learned to perceive his universe in double bind
patterns.
It was a complex paper and it drew complex reactions
for the next 40 years. The so-called ingredients were con-
tinuously revised by the group. Their final statement, in
1962, withdrew from aetiologic claims for schizophre-
nia, and the notion of a binder acting on a victim. Instead,
they proposed ‘the most useful way is phrasing double
bind description in terms of people caught up in an ongo-
ing system which produces conflicting definitions of the
relationships and consequent subjective distress’ [32].
By that time the idea of double binding had gripped
both the scientific and popular imagination. It had great
intuitive appeal to clinicians working with families and
individuals whose lives seemed ‘stuck’ or ‘in a bind’. It
came to mean many things: Catch 22, or incongruent dou-
ble messages, or knots [18], or a situation where a person
cannot win no matter what. Often these ideas were far
removed from the original construct. Sometimes the con-
cept drew abuse. Shorter comments that it was a theory
‘. . . where the mother was the cause of the children’s
psychosis’ [33]. This was a misunderstanding, but not an
incomprehensible one.
In truth, the theory was very slippery at an empirical
level. It was, Abeles concluded, ‘an unresearchable con-
struct’: ‘It was not possible to isolate the participants
and components and events and history and context of a
pattern and still have that pattern’ [1]. Bateson himself
acknowledged it was ‘so slippery that perhaps no imagin-
able set of empirical facts could contradict it’ [1, p.320].
For him the Double Bind was an idea, a formal pattern
coming from observing communicative interactions, but
not identical with any single instance of communication.
Actual behaviours were markers (or embodiments) of the
pattern, but the Double Bind is a class at a higher level of
analysis. It does not cause anything, and is not especially
relevant to schizophrenia. It is more like a new language,
or an ‘epistemology’ in Bateson’s rather idiosyncratic
1041
use of the term. Learning the language led to learning to
organize observations in terms of patterning of communi-
cation and systems of influence. By grasping this unit of
analysis, therapists learnt, as they say, to ‘think family’.
After 10 years, and a project that produced 63 papers,
Bateson grew tired of psychiatry [8]. In particular, he
was weary with his conflicts with Jay Haley, his talented
collaborator. Haley was interested in the application of
cybernetic ideas to therapy. He wanted results. Bateson
worried about his manipulative and invasive methods.
Bateson was always wary of consciously planned inter-
vention at any level of the system, a theme he took on with
greater passion as he got older. His opposition to Haley
was based on Haley’s emphasis on ‘power’ as an expla-
nation of social interaction. Bateson was not interested in
‘power plays’ and was suspicious of Haley’s incorpora-
tion of ‘power’ into his models of therapy. To Bateson the
metaphor of power led back to a kind of survival-of-the-
fittest Darwinism he had learnt to abhor from William
Bateson.
Bateson also felt pre-empted by his research team with
the publication of ‘Pragmatics of Human Communica-
tion’ in 1967 [34]. This book went on to become the
classic text explicating the new ideas of communica-
tion theory. Haley reported Bateson saying the book
‘stole thirty of his ideas’. Pragmatics presented commu-
nication theory and practice in isolation from its larger
cultural and evolutionary contexts. This did make the
ideas very clear but was anathema to Bateson [26, p.28].
Bateson left Palo Alto accompanied by a ‘growing dis-
taste for all the people concerned, including the psychia-
trists, the patients, the psychologists, the families and the
VA hospital and boredom with the repetitive nature of
the transactional patterns all these persons exhibit’ [26,
p.28].
He set off to John Lilly’s research centres and Florida
and the Virgin Islands, and later to the Oceania Insti-
tute, Hawaii, to study communication among dolphins.
As Parks notes: ‘Nobody could reasonably expect him to
change the lives of dolphins. His real goal in Palo Alto
had never been therapy, but research’ [35].
‘Towards a Theory of Schizophrenia’, despite its dif-
ficulties in empirical application (or perhaps because of
them) was a new beginning, the foundational paper for the
field of family therapy. It opened a new landscape, and
placed the intrapsychic field of psychoanalysis within
the network of exchanges of this larger unit. It gave
birth to a new group of social and interactional ther-
apies of which family therapy was the first, including
narrative, solution-based, strategic and network therapies
[36]. The borders of psychotherapy were expanded, as a
new language that made disturbed behaviour socially in-
telligible generated wider and wider descriptions. These
1042 GREGORY BATESON (1904–1980)
descriptions used the language of communication and
context, hierarchy and levels, boundaries and home-
ostasis, feedback and interaction. They were expanded,
‘ecosystemic’ ways of seeing the world and they drew
many converts.
Don Jackson proposed the Palo Alto group form the
Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Stanford, the first of
many free-standing family therapy institutes in the world.
(Bateson did not join [37]. He did not want his consultant
(Jackson) over him as director – he was very aware of
strange loops!) In 1963, MRI sponsored Family Process,
still the pre-eminent journal in the field.
In Milan, Palazolli and her group rigorously extended
Bateson’s logic into a highly original therapeutic method,
and formulated the key ‘systemic guiding principles’ of
hypothesizing, circularity and neutrality [38–39]. Circu-
lar questioning became for systemic therapy what free
association was for psychoanalysis. It was based on the
Batesonian idea of ‘information of difference’. Questions
are asked sequentially to bring out patterns and connec-
tions in a system ‘Who is closest to who, next closest . . . .
If brother left who would be next closest, who would
be saddest?’ etc. A whole range of inventive questions
has since been generated. The great early promise of the
Milan approaches, with their rather extravagant decla-
rations of ‘cures’ for schizophrenia and anorexia have
faded, but their ideas have found wide application in
family therapy.
Much less dramatic than the Milan group, the care-
ful cumulative work in psychoeducational approaches
in schizophrenia has perhaps borne greater fruit [40].
The Double Bind theory prompted research into the en-
tanglements, over-closeness and ‘transactional’ thought
disorder often observed in families with schizophrenic
members. These were not universal phenomena, and may
well be an effect of having a schizophrenic family mem-
ber rather than a cause. Nevertheless, careful research
has shown the validity of such constructs as Expressed
Emotion, and the positive benefits of modifying negative
affective interactional styles by Psychoeducational and
multiple family group processes. This may be the most
important practical legacy of the ideas first proposed by
Bateson [41].
Geertz writes that, ‘after a new powerful idea has burst
upon the intellectual landscape . . . to hold for a time the
conceptual centre point around which a comprehensive
system of analysis can be built, it will be subsequently
tamed through application and extension until we recog-
nise the idea does not explain everything . . .. Our atten-
tion shifts to isolating just what that something is and to
disentangling ourselves from a lot of pseudo-science to
which in the first flush of celebrity it has also given rise’
[42, p.38]. The ‘Double Bind’ was just such a powerful
new idea, with family therapy in all its variety being one
conventional extension and application. But Bateson was
always rather dismayed by the interest of family thera-
pists in his ideas and always vigilant about disengaging
from the pseudoscience and the reifications produced by
therapists.
‘Steps’
In 1972, Bateson published ‘Steps to an Ecology of
Mind’ [4]. It was his first book in 20 years, and his most
famous, an anthology of articles which had been scat-
tered in inaccessible journals. ‘Steps’ showed Bateson’s
thinking across diverse areas including Balinese culture,
evolution, schizophrenia, alcoholism, dolphins and cy-
bernetics, as part of a single exploration. A technical
label for this thinking might be ‘systems theory’, but
Bateson preferred ‘ecology’. The Steps referred to the
active ‘stepwise’ participation needed by the reader in
integrating his material. The book is obscure in parts, but
other parts are elegantly clear. Lyman Wynne called read-
ing Bateson ‘frustrating’ and requiring second readings.
But ‘an open meditative frame of mind, can transform the
puzzling passage into one that is lucid and illuminating’
[26, p.82]. Many people who have persevered with Bate-
son have reported this reaction. Harries–Jones compares
Bateson to Wittgenstein in the way they both consistently
try to show how such formal thinking can operate to illu-
minate everyday living. Bateson is ‘showing’ how such
thinking can occur: his examples and anecdotes are not
so much to communicate facts and data, as to bring forth
ideas and metaphors [43]. His way of thinking and see-
ing is not an abstraction, but a tangible experience that
can be cultivated by practice. It elucidates and expands
rather than describes. Bateson was fond of quoting ee
cummings: ‘ever the more beautiful answer who asks the
more difficult question’.
Bateson became a hero after Steps, and in the New Age
California of his time, something of a cult figure [28].
He lectured widely, speaking out more and more about
the ecologic crisis, and the threats of nuclear war, and
‘avoidance of the death of the largest system about which
we can care’ [2, p.220]. ‘The organism which destroys its
environment destroys itself’ (p.483). But he was no rad-
ical. Although adopted by the counterculture, he shared
few of its ideas, and rejected its anti-intellectualism
and the imprecise language of its pseudospirituality. He
was opposed to bad thinking, be it from mechanical
behaviourists or mystical idealists.
Like his father he was a conservative, who respected
rather than challenged the natural order of things. ‘Per-
haps the most convincing evidence that evolution is a
 B. STAGOLL
mental process is its slowness, its fits and starts, its errors
and stupidity. In a word, its conservatism’ [44, p.xii].
In 1974, I heard Bateson lecture, or rather witnessed
him performing. He had great physical presence and
a resonant King’s English voice. He was six feet five
inches tall, with a rumpled suit and hair, circling around
drawing on a cigarette and coughing. He interacted in-
tensely with the audience, taking up an idea, spinning it
around, sending it back. You felt you were collaborat-
ing with him, as he pondered out loud with a mysterious
smile on his face. He resisted the format of a traditional
lecture (he always resisted pre-existing structures), de-
veloping his ideas with metaphors, stories and parables
rather than following a single theme. He was, I suppose,
performing ‘a metalogue’, a style he had often used in
his writings, where the form is meant to illustrate the
content. He seemed enormously alert to the context and
responses of the audience. I found it exhilarating. I could
also see why sometimes the audience left disappointed or
perplexed.
Margaret Mead spoke of how Bateson in interaction
could generate an unusual sense of augmentation of intel-
ligence, ‘a peculiar quality (hard to describe) in which he
distilled ideas from interaction with other people which
they in turn can distill again’ [45].
Last books
In the late 1970s, Bateson was dying of lung cancer, but
with the help of his daughter Mary Catherine completed
two more books. ‘Mind and Nature’ written for a gen-
eral audience, is his most accessible book [2]. It returns
to Bateson’s first interest in the analogy between evolu-
tionary change and the structure of the mind. A ‘mind’
is any system with a capacity respond to information in
self-corrective ways. This is characteristic of living sys-
tems, from cells to forests to civilizations. For Bateson
there is a holistic unity among human mental process and
culture and biology: ‘Mind is a reflection of the large
and many parts of the natural world outside the thinker’.
He is not interested in reducing matter into mind, but in
re-introducing mind into matter as its pattern and fabric,
texture and weave. Mind is not above Matter, it is not
‘transcendent’. It is in Matter or ‘immanent’. All biolog-
ical phenomena are, in his friend Warren McCulloch’s
phrase, ‘Embodiments of Mind’ [46].
Bateson’s idea of ‘mind’ extended beyond the skin.
‘What I am saying expands mind outwards (just as
Freudian psychology expanded the concept of mind in-
wards). Both of these changes reduce the scope of the
conscious self. A certain humility becomes appropriate
1043
tempered by the dignity or joy of being part of something
much bigger’ [4, p.462].
Bateson’s defining criteria of mind includes any cir-
cular system of interacting parts, where interaction is
triggered by difference (‘difference is the analogue of
cause’). A mind can include non-living elements as well
as multiple organisms and the unit of survival is al-
ways the organism-plus-environment which co-evolve
together. Such interacting systems select pattern from
random elements, as happens in learning and evolution
‘the two great stochastic processes’ [26], that derive nov-
elty out of randomness.
Bateson’s strong implication is that the whole of na-
ture is imbued with qualities of mind, and we should
treat nature with the same respect due to a human mind.
We live within the world of nature, not as ‘rational
onlookers’ from the outside. Cartesian detachment and
objectivity is a ‘false epistemology’ that results in ‘inap-
propriate descriptions’. Whatever scientific understand-
ing we achieve must be a kind of understanding that
occurs from the ‘inside’. ‘Epistemology is always and in-
variably personal. The point of the probe is always in the
heart of the explorer. What is my answer to the questions
of the nature of knowing? I surrender to the belief that
my knowing is a small part of a wider integrated knowing
that knits the entire biosphere or creation’ [2, p.87].
Bateson’s last book ‘Angels Fear’ [47] was published
posthumously, from ‘miscellaneous, unintegrated and in-
complete’ manuscripts put together by Mary Catherine
Bateson. Bateson traced destructive human actions to in-
appropriate descriptions, such as those based on by super-
naturalism (pure mind without matter) and materialism
(matter without mind). He was equally opposed to both.
‘Very simply let me say I despise and fear both of these
extremes of opinion and that I believe both extremes to
be epistemologically naive, wrong and politically dan-
gerous. They are also dangerous to something which we
may loosely call mental health’. His task was ‘to ex-
plore whether there is a sane and valid place for religion
somewhere between these two nightmares of nonsense’
[47, p.198]. Religion provided ‘a rich, internally struc-
tured model that stands in metaphorical relationship to
the whole of life, and therefore can be used to think with’
[47, p.195]. Religious processes address vital epistemo-
logical problems around the limitations of knowledge and
the unavoidable gaps in any description: ‘the only kind of
cognitive system that could provide a model for the inte-
gration and complexity of the natural world’ [39, p.199].
They can provide solutions to the mind/body problem.
For Bateson, who called himself a ‘fifth generation un-
baptised atheist’ [48, p.12], it was finally the sacred
that could provide the model for the integrated fabric of
1044 GREGORY BATESON (1904–1980)
mental process ‘that envelopes all our lives’. He had re-
turned to the hero of his youth, William Blake, as his
inspiration. Like Blake, he was a visionary who saw in
an original, unified and particular way [49].
Bateson offered two meanings of ‘sacred’: ‘that with
which we shall not tinker’, and ‘a sense of the whole
which can only be met with awe . . . and which inspires
humility’ [47, p.48].
‘The sacred’ is the whole, and it is the ‘pattern that
connects’ [47, p.200]. It is how parts fit aesthetically into
a holistic order, where holism, unity and beauty were
coincident with each other. It was not a transcendent, but
an immanent holism. As Bateson said, from his house
overlooking the Pacific, ‘I am not a deist, but I do believe
the ocean out there is alive: is that religious?’.
Bateson died haunted by a sense of urgency that the
narrow definition of human purpose which had lost ‘the
sacred’ in a materialist and technological society was
leading to irreversible ecologic disasters. Like his father,
he felt he had not communicated what he knew and he
felt deeply misunderstood.
Will his time come, like it finally did for William?
Legacy of Bateson
His biographer, Lipset, comments that Bateson was
‘doubly anachronistic, both ahead and behind his times’
[8, p.xii]. He often seems a throwback to the nine-
teenth century, continuing the debates around Darwin-
ism and Science led by his father and his other great
heroes (William Blake, Samuel Butler, Lewis Carroll,
Lamarck, Whitehead and Russell). He did not link up to
the contemporary debates in the philosophy of science
or mind, especially in his last decade. He never refers
to Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend or Searle, and barely to
Wittgenstein.
Yet in other ways he remained ahead of his times. As
a younger man he pioneered cybernetic and communica-
tion theory in social science and psychotherapy. Later
he developed holistic and evolutionary models of the
self-organizing biosphere. His critique of induction and
empiricism as the model for scientific discovery has be-
come more accepted. His insistence on relational thinking
and ‘double description’, and recursively returning to the
data, to observe the observing, is a model for contextual
thinking, a language of relations rather than things that
leads beyond the linear stimulus–response paradigms of
behavioural science and of genetics. His preference for
thinking in aesthetic terms of pattern rather than quanti-
tative and reductive terms provides an alternative to the
dominant and (to Bateson) pathological systems of
thought afflicting industrial civilization.
Bateson made streams of ideas flow together into a con-
fluence of aesthetic, holistic, interactive, recursive and,
above all, contextual ways of thinking that foreshadow
many ‘post-modern’ developments in biology, ecology
and philosophy. His legacy was to show us just how we
might develop a systemic wisdom, how we need to think
if we are to survive in our new century.
At the end of his life, he wrote about the battle with
Moloch, his Blakean image of orthodox scientific opin-
ion ‘Moloch after all is very stupid and quite capable of
swallowing the notion that he is, and was always “right”
in what he “meant” to say. It is only his language that
was wrong. And if the battle must finally be joined, let
us choose the battlefield. Moloch will surely do his best
to fight the battle on some ground on which he has ir-
relevant advantage. (He will accuse us of Lamarckism,
obscurantism, failure of scholarship, etc. etc.) What is
interesting is that the underlying battle is really about the
choice of battlefield. Our stand is correctly and precisely
upon the question: “Which language shall be used? . . . .”’
[50].
Bateson offers a new language for taking that stand.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to David Bathgate, Edwin Harari, Max
Cornwell, Michael Madden, Brian Cade, Jenny Ouliaris,
Graeme Meadows and Chris Beels for helpful
discussions.
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