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Sergio Manghi

Bateson and Girard: the tolerance of vulnerability as a condition for positive reciprocity

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As the scholars of mimetic theory know, the relevance given by René Girard to the concept of double bind is remarkable. This concept was created about half a century ago by the English anthropologist Gregory Bateson. Since then, it has been implied in many fields: in anthropology (Girard), in philosophy (Derrida), and in psychotherapy, especially as regards the treatment of those paradoxical communicative processes in the families that psychiatry defines with the term schizophrenia. The so-called “School of Palo Alto” is the most well-known “school” in this field, among many others.

René Girard attributes to the idea of double bind a strategic position in his theory of double reciprocal imitation as the base for human affairs. At the same time, Girard’s interest in this idea is accompanied by an objection. In his important book Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde Girard observes that Bateson unfortunately limits the idea of double bind to the restricted field of the theory of communication; that very notion, Girard writes, would have its best development within the wider and “prodigious religious and cultural context” (Girard, 1978, p. 318: “prodijeux contexte religieux et culturel”).

As a sociologist interested in the anthropological and evolutionary bases of human social life, I have studied the suggestive Batesonian works for a long time (Manghi, 1990, 1998, 2002, 2004a). And as a sociologist strongly influenced, at the same time, by the suggestive Girardian theory (Manghi, 1996, 2001, 2006), I will try here to underline the convergences between Bateson and Girard. I would like to stress some aspects of Batesonian reflections on schizophrenia, mostly neglected, which show how for Bateson the communicative and the religious languages were more interlaced with one another than one usually believes. In particular, I would like to show how these Batesonan reflections help us to understand better the dynamics of transformation from negative to positive reciprocity, as a process requiring tolerance of vulnerability, of doubt and of uncertainty.

My hypothesis is that Batesonian idea of schizophrenia is closer to the mimetic theory than to the theory of communication of the Palo Alto school or other similar schools of thought. In fact, the latter have been the main channel of notoriety for the concept of double bind. But their interpretation of that concept aimed to make of it only a technical communicative device for psychotherapy, which disregarded Bateson’s thought.    

To say that the Batesonian double bind is closer to the Girardian mimesis than to Pragmatics of communication, as I will try to underline, does not mean that they are identical, of course. In particular, as I have discussed elsewhere (Manghi, 2004, ch. 3; 2006), in the Batesonian reflections we do not find the hypothesis about the unicity of Christian anthropology, which on the contrary is very important, as we know very well, in Girardian reflections. However, I think that it is important to underline that, as regards the two other great chapters of the Girardian thought, synthesized in the two keywords reciprocal imitation and victimary process, the convergences with Bateson are significant and suggestive.

Here I will not deal with the hypothesis of reciprocal imitation, strongly convergent with the Batesonian idea that between living creatures the relationship always comes first, be it amoebas or human beings. A convergence which it would be very interesting to discuss, moreover, in the light of the recent research about mirror neurons. But here I will limit my attention, in particular, to the topic of victimary process. A subject in which the convergences between Bateson and Girard have never or rarely been stressed.

II

In order to underline these convergences, I will discuss a brief essay by Gregory Bateson about an exemplary case of schizophrenia. An essay which is never quoted in the three or four works, collected in the third part of his famous book Steps to an Ecology of Mind, and that are usually discussed by psychotherapists and communication scholars. If we consider this third part of Steps to an Ecology of Mind within the framework of the whole book, which is composed of six parts, the Batesonian meaning of schizophrenia is different from the most well-known one. But we cannot deny that the prevailing language in these essays, written in the fifties of the 20^th century, is mainly anchored to the key words of formal communication: paradoxes, double binds, contexts, genetics, metaphors, meanings, messages, injunctions, logical levels, communicative meta-levels, and so on.

The language of the brief essay I will discuss here is quite different. In it, we find important words, such as sacrificial victim, code of concealing and sacrifice, initiatory ceremony, that are taken from the language of ritual and religion, focusing the connection, to say it in Girardian words, between sacrifice, social order, transformation of negative reciprocities into positive reciprocities through the consciousness of the violent ordering function of the scapegoat.

The brief Batesonian essay I am referring to, which I widely discussed in an article which recently appeared in the journal World Futures, is the Introduction to the book Perceval’s Narrative, edited in 1961 by Bateson himself. The book is the autobiography of John Perceval, a fecund schizophrenic who was born in 1803 and died in 1876. The author narrates that he experienced psychosis and recovered, and gives his peculiar explanations regarding the nature of that psychosis and his recovery.

Bateson’s introduction to Perceval’s book provides an admiring comment to those peculiar explanations. The reason for Bateson’s admiring tone is that he saw in Perceval’s memoirs a theoretical rigorousness worth noting, which was much more than biographical testimony. In addition, he saw Perceval as an ante litteram precursor of the theory he had been working on for some years: the double bind theory. In short, he saw Perceval as a precursor – between William Blake and Sigmund Freud – of the idea that psychosis is an experience of a relational as well as social nature, both internal and external, like all human communicative processes.

Bateson believes that Perceval has clearly described, naturally with hindsight, how at a certain point in the psychotic event he started to glimpse the possibility of getting out of the absurd cul-de-sac. And Bateson believes that he manages to achieve the description by understanding the exact network of the relational, communicative, social fabric of the foolish interactive process he was an active part of. As Bateson wrote, Perceval angrily “began to realize the nature of the system that surrounded and controlled him” (1962b, p. xiii). And at the same time he painfully started to grasp and hold firmly a distinct, crucial piece of information in the changing flow of the delirium: the stabilizing role he had given himself, in syntony with the others, in the wider system.

III

In other words, Perceval succeeds in describing how he became aware that by accepting the label of mad, and by behaving consequently, he reassured both family and physicians. And, of course, various “inner voices”, mostly of a religious nature – first of all, the Holy Ghost, legitimated by Perceval’s adherence to a certain Evangelical church, the Irvingites. By accepting the label of mad, someone who was inadequate to correspond to the moral and affective expectations of others, and by behaving consequently, he was confirming others in their self-esteem. In this way, paradoxically, and coming full circle, he was reassuring himself. In other words, he was achieving a comforting feeling that he was dealing with people who were self-confident, devoid of uncertainties, reliable. The feeling that he could trust people who were affectively, morally and scientifically competent. Or, at least, that is what he was trying to do: with disastrous results, since the more he confirmed the others, the more he himself was disconfirmed.

It is from that moment, when Perceval started to perceive, painfully, the intimately social nature of the delirious system he was a part of, and his own active role in stabilizing that very system, that the progressive achievement of a happier life than his previous one started for him. Even happier than the life he led before the psychosis: and it is this result that led Bateson to formulate a rather perplexing question, at least as far as our common sense is concerned: the question was whether the psychosis can be seen, first of all, as a path to self-recovery and not as a disease. Seen as a necessary therapeutic path in a double-binding communicative context. Curative, albeit very painful for all those who are not part of the nightmare: a “curative nightmare”, Bateson calls it. Where the symptom is never only defence against the illness, but an attack against the illness:

It is one thing to see the symptom as a part of a defense mechanism; it is quite another to conceive that the body or the mind contains, in some form, such wisdom that can create that attack upon itself that will lead to a later resolution of the pathology. (ibidem, p. xii)

Maybe we find here some traces of a certain naturalistic optimism, maybe underestimating the relevance, for the emergence of the quoted wisdom, of a culture of the victim’s innocence. A Christian culture, as we learned from Girard, which in the time and in the world of Perceval was part of the common sense, but which cannot be found in nature. But, beyond this question, which we will not discuss here, as I have already said, the way Bateson describes Perceval’s “curative nightmare” remains interesting.

It is remarkable, I believe, that many important passages in this speech make use of metaphors which go beyond the language used to speak of the communicative process as it is formally intended – metaphors drawn from religious anthropologic language. Suffice it to read the following extracts (the italics are ours), taken from the last pages of Bateson’s Introduction:

Once begun, a schizophrenic episode would appear to have as definite a course as an initiation ceremony –– a death and rebirth – into which the novice may have been precipitated by his family life or by adventitious circumstances, but which in its course is largely steered by endogenous processes. (ibidem, p. xiv)

…the patient’s love for his parents enforces upon him a deep secrecy regarding the sacrificial nature of his behavior. (ibidem, p. xiii).

In almost every such family, it is possible to recognize that the psychotic individual has the function of a necessary sacrifice. (ibidem, p. xvii)

Before the psychosis his exactitude was his self-sacrificing mode. During psychosis, he passes through the phase of bitterness, where the violence takes the place of the former precision.

We may suppose that this code of concealment and sacrifice was in many ways uncomfortable and that his groping after evangelical religion was both a quest for some escape and a cleaning to whatever would support his careful uprightness. (ibidem, p. xix)

Conventionally, schizophrenia is regarded as a disease […] in this introductory essay I have suggested that the psychosis is more like some vast and painful initiatory ceremony conducted by the self. (ibidem)

IV

Could we reduce these religious terms to mere verbal artifice – metaphors – aimed at adding a colourful touch to the speech? I do not think so. Not only because metaphors, to Bateson, as the Batesonian scholars know very well, were never neutral, innocent artifices, but always interfaces between different contexts of meanings. And secondly, because Bateson’s motivation to describe schizophrenia through a language wider than that of psychiatry and of formal communication has to be understood, it seems to me, in the context of the particular moment of his life he was experiencing in the fifties and the 60s of the 20^th century. The fifties in Palo Alto and the 60s which will be, for him, a crucial time: the time of the insights that will give birth to his most important and famous book:  Steps to an Ecology of Mind.

The passage between the fifties and the 60s was the time, on the one hand, which rapidly saw the affirmation of systemic-relational therapies inspired by the notion of double bind; but also, on another, the time of the open break between Bateson and his colleagues in Palo Alto (cf. Berger, 1978). It is in this context that I am going to interpret the Batesonian interest in the re-publication of an old book he had found in a bookstall, in the forties, returning from an anthological journey in New Guinea. An old book of memoirs by an odd schizophrenic, which in the language of religion found the worst and the best of his life.

As Paolo Bertrando writes:  “In Perceval, Bateson finds an exemplary case which helps him free himself of psychiatry” (2005, p. 377). And of mere formal communication too, I would like to add. The function of the Perceval case for Bateson was in a certain sense analogous to the function of the Schreber case for Sigmund Freud. With the difference that Bateson considered extremely important for the mind, more than Freud (or maybe more than many Freudians) what happens outside the skin of the individual: from interpersonal dynamics right to the higher levels of social, ritual and symbolic relationships. While the pragmatic schools of communication tended to circumscribe the field of  social interaction to control their pathologies, Bateson’s aim was to open our eyes and our hearts to ever wider contexts of our experience, right to the widest one: the sacred. Concluding a conference on cybernetics, in 1966, he invited us to “change our philosophy of control”, and “view our follies in a wider perspective” (in 1972, p. 477)

Throughout the seventies, Bateson’s interest in the sacred grew as is clearly shown in the conclusion of Mind and Nature, published in 1979, and developed into the project of writing a book on the sacred, with his daughter, Mary Catherine, born from his marriage with Margaret Mead. But Bateson died in 1980, when the project was at the beginning. The notes were published thanks to Mary Catherine several years later, with the title Angel’s Fear. Toward an Epistemology of the Sacred (Bateson, Bateson, 1987; cf. Bateson, M.C., 1988). They showed that Bateson’s interest in the sacred was going beyond not only the disciplinary borders of anthropological works of the ’20s and ’30s, but also the research carried out in the ’60s and ’70s on the ecology of the creatural universe. As Mary Catherine wrote:

He had become aware gradually that the unity of nature he had affirmed in Mind and Nature might only be comprehensible through the kind of metaphors familiar from religion; that, in fact, he was approaching that integrative dimension of experience called the sacred. This was a matter he approached with great trepidation, partly because he had been raised in a dogmatically atheistic household and partly because he saw the potential in religion for manipulation and division (in Bateson, Bateson, 1987, p. 2).

In this biographical perspective, Bateson’s brief essay on the Perceval case acquires a remarkable relevance. Thanks to the interpretative filter of mimetic theory, we have of course to add, it is possible to better understand the depth of the Batesonian intuitions about communicative processes, in the same direction of the “prodigious religious and cultural context” wished by René Girard.

V

For Bateson, Perceval is at once the victim and the master of ceremonies of a sacrificial rite, an initiation rite which may or may not be successful. In other words, Perceval had access to knowledge that was far more ancient and subtle than scientific knowledge about communication: ceremonial and sacrificial knowledge, in fact. Perceval was aware, in Girardian terms, of the oldest and most powerful recipe human beings have ever devised to obtain order from disorder; to interrupt the escalation of misunderstandings, of disqualifications and of the violence unleashed by our recurrent relational, communicative and social crises. This recipe of the sacrificial victim.

As we have seen, Perceval, with his self-sacrifice, became the guarantor and custodian of a social order which was in crisis: of a complex social system which included the family, the influential social institution Medicine, and other broader symbolic contexts we shall not go into here for lack of space: suffice it to point out that John Perceval was one of twelve children (six sons and six daughters) whose father, a British Prime Minister, was shot at and killed by a madman in front of the House of Commons (cf. in this regard Bertrando’s acute considerations, 2005).

In short, Perceval’s self-sacrifice simply outlined a clear, distinct difference where everything risked being lost in chaos, without any of the subjects involved being aware of it: the difference between normality and folly, considered as a dualistic difference (aut-aut). Through an active, unconscious acceptance of this difference as a vital foundation for the survival of the entire system, Perceval stemmed the process of increasing indifferentiation which he was part of. The increasing of that ominous grey area, as Primo Levi called it, where persecutors and victims become stickily indistinguishable (cf. Levi, 1986).

The flight from the double bind in which Perceval was caught was not achieved, however, by refusing his role as master of ceremonies in the name of behaviour based on individual self-determination (as at times he seems to believe, forgetting – as Bateson comments – that he was speaking “with hindsight”), but rather by a rigorous interpretation of that role, which activated his unconscious, aesthetic and religious knowledge. The knowledge which in Bateson’s text appears also through the musical metaphor of “orchestration”:

By mysterious unconscious processes, then, Perceval was able to orchestrate his own psychotic experience to enforce his own passage through psychosis. (Bateson, 1962b, p. xii)

Through this complex “orchestration”, Perceval  could leave the black and white universe of the paranoid, and began to tolerate his own vulnerability, uncertainty and ambivalence (Manghi, 2004b). To tolerate doubt, instead of fearing it and feeling guilty for it, as Perceval himself clearly writes:

I perished from an habitual error of mind, that of fearing to doubt, and of taking the guilt of doubt upon my conscience (Perceval, in Bateson, 1962a, p. 37).

This is the Bateson’s comment to these Perceval’s “error”:

His error, as I read it, was a failure of responsibility. He ought not to have glutted his pride and weighted his conscience by branding doubt as “guility”. Rather, ho should have accepted doubt as a function of the individual mind to be responsibly exercised. He ought to have taken the responsibility for doubt upon his conscience. (Bateson, 1962b, p. ix).

Through this assumption of responsibility for doubt, Perceval could try to transform the previous negative reciprocities in which he was trapped into positives ones. He married, had several daughters, and devoted himself for the rest of his life in the defense of weak persons. These words are taken from his own introduction to his memoirs:

I open my mouth for the dumb; and let it be recollected, that I write in defence of youth and old age, of female delicacy, modesty, and tenderness, not only of man and of manhood. (Perceval, in Bateson, 1962a, p. 4)

The schizophrenic Perceval thus exhibits a “systemic wisdom”, to use Bateson’s subsequent expression, precious not only for those dealing with schizophrenia, strictly speaking, but for all of us. Systemic wisdom which, through the filter of mimetic theory, can help us understand better the ways in which we human beings bestow order through subtly unconscious processes to our interactions, to our emotions, to our coexistence, and can help us explore, especially, new ways of coexistence, more and more free from the powerful myth of sacrificial victim. More and more free from the tyrannic coherence of the past.

To conclude my talk, let me quote, without any comment, some verses of an extraordinary, contemporary italian poet. A woman who knew the hard reality of the psychiatric hospital. Her name is Alda Merini (1991):

Io sono certa che nulla più soffocherà la mia rima,

il silenzio l’ho tenuto chiuso per anni nella gola

come una trappola da sacrificio,

è quindi venuto il momento di cantare

una esequie al passato.[1]

References

Bateson, G., Ed. 1962a. Perceval’s narrative: A patient’s account of his psychosis, 1830-1832. 2nd Edition.  London: The Hogarth Press.

Bateson, G. 1962b.  Introduction. In Perceval’s narrative: A patient’s account of his psychosis, 1830-1832. 2nd Edition, Ed. Bateson, G., v-xx. London: The Hogarth Press.

Bateson, G. 1972. Steps to an ecology of mind, San Francisco: Ballantine.

Bateson, G. 2002. Mind and nature: A necessary unity. Creskill NJ: Hampton Press.

Bateson, G. 1991. A Sacred unity: Further steps to an ecology of mind. Ed. Donaldson, R.E. New York: Harper Collins.

Bateson, G., Bateson, M.C. 1987. Angels fear: Toward an epistemology of the sacred. New York: Macmillan.

Bateson, M.C. 1988. Comment a germé ‘Angel’s fear’, In Bateson: Premier état d’un héritage, Ed. Winkin, Y., 26-43. Paris: Seuil.

Berger, M.M., Ed. 1978. Beyond the double bind. New York: Brunner & Mazel.

Bertrando, P. 2005. Versioni di Perceval. In Perceval. Un paziente narra la propria psicosi, 1830-1832. Ed. Bateson, G., 357-381. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri.

Girard, R. 1978. Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde. Paris: Grasset

Girard, R. 2000. Pourquoi la violence? In Violences, victimes et vengeances, Ed. Dumouchel P., 13-30. Paris: L’Harmattan.

Girard, R. 2003. Origine della cultura e fine della storia. Dialoghi con P. Antonello e J.C. de Castro Rocha. Milano: Cortina.

Levi, P. 1986. I sommersi e i salvati. Torino: Einaudi.

Manghi, S. 1990. Il gatto con le ali Ecologia della mente e pratiche sociali. Milano: Feltrinelli (2nd ed. Trieste: Asterios, 2000)..

Manghi, S. 1996. Grazia e violenza nelle relazioni sociali. Prefazione. In Tomelleri, S. René Girard. La matrice sociale della violenza, 7-14. Milano: Angeli.

Manghi, S, Ed. 1998. Attraverso Bateson. Ecologia della mente e relazioni sociali. Milano: Raffaello Cortina.

Manghi, S. 2000. For an aesthetics of knowing. Twenty conjectures on the responsiveness to connections in science practices. World Futures (55)2: 277-292.

Manghi, S. 2001. La dissacrazione infinita. Violenza pagana e rivelazione cristiana. Pluriverso (6)2: 55-61.

Manghi, S. 2002. In wider perspective. Foreword. In Bateson, G. Mind and nature: a necessary unity, ix-xiii. Creskill NJ: Hampton Press.

Manghi, S. 2004a. La conoscenza ecologica. Attualità di Gregory Bateson. Milano: Cortina.

Manghi, S. 2004b. Nella casa di vetro. Ecologia della mente e responsabilità del dubbio. La società degli individui (7)2, 109-119.

Manghi, S. 2006. Traps for sacrifice. The schizophrenic of Gregory Bateson and the scapegoat of René Girard. World Futures 62: 561-575.

Merini, A. 1991, Vuoto d’amore. Torino: Einaudi.

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Dipartimento di Studi Politici e Sociali, Università degli Studi di Parma, Borgo Carissimi 10, 43100 Parma, Italy