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Bateson’s cybernetics: the basis of MRI brief therapy – prologue
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Bateson’s cybernetics: the basis
of MRI brief therapy – prologue
KYB 94215—29/6/2007—RAGHAVAN—278047 The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/0368-492X.htm Bateson’s cybernetics: the basis of MRI brief therapy – prologue Bateson’s cybernetics Wendel A. Ray Marriage and Family Therapy Program, The University of Louisiana at Monroe (ULM), Monroe, Louisiana, USA, and Mental Research Institute (MRI), Palo Alto, California, USA 859 Abstract Purpose – To provide direct access to original documents relevant to the emergence of applied constructivist and cybernetic epistemology in the behavioral sciences. Design/methodology/approach – This paper employs hermeneutic analysis Findings – Direct evidence of the cybernetic, interactional theory articulated by Gregory Bateson provides the theoretical foundation for the problem formation, problem resolution model set forth by research associates at the Brief Therapy Center of the Mental Research Institute. Originality/value – This is a rare, never previously published address by a principal founder of communication/interactional theory Keywords Cybernetics, Structural analysis, Control Paper type Conceptual paper For many years whenever John Weakland, Paul Watzlawick, and Richard Fisch conducted training at the Mental Research Institute (MRI), they would begin by acknowledging three major influences – Gregory Bateson’s theoretical, Don D. Jackson’s pragmatic, and Milton H. Erickson’s hypnosis – on the MRI Brief Therapy orientation. The contributions of members of the MRI Brief Therapy Center and the model of Brief Therapy they created (Fisch et al., 1972, 1982; Weakland et al., 1974; Watzlawick et al., 1974; Weakland and Ray, 1995; Fisch and Schlanger, 1999) continues to be among the most influential orientations in the fields of family and brief therapy, serving as the pragmatic and philosophical foundation of more recently articulated advances in constructivism, social construction, post-modern, and clinical practice orientations (Watzlawick, 1984; Keeney, 1983; Ray and Keeney, 1993; de Shazer, 1994; Watzlawick and Nardone, 1997). Conceptually, the central tenet of the MRI Brief Therapy model is straightforward and easy to grasp – difficulties are part of life and typically are handled in ways that they resolve themselves. Difficulties can become problems, viscous cycles and games without end, when ineffective attempts to solve inadvertently serve to maintain and perpetuate them. Successfully interrupt problem maintaining attempted solutions and difficulties resolve (correct) themselves and dissipate. When first introduced the q Wendel A. Ray – “The first Don D. Jackson Memorial Address” given by Gregory Bateson. q The Estate of Gregory Bateson. This previously unpublished transcript is published in this issue of Kybernetes with the kind permission of the Institute for Intercultural Studies (www. interculturalstudies.org) and Mary Catherine Bateson. For permission to republish this transcript, correspond with Mary Catherine Bateson, President of IIS: mcatb@attglobal.net The author wishes to thank Bradford Keeney and Mary Catherine Bateson for helpful critiques of this paper. Kybernetes Vol. 36 No. 7/8, 2007 pp. 859-870 q Wendal A. Ray; and The Estate of Gregory Bateson 0368-492X DOI 10.1108/03684920710777388 KYB 94215—29/6/2007—RAGHAVAN—278047 K 36,7/8 860 problem/attempted solution framework was widely and enthusiastically accepted, becoming an essential part of the fabric of most systemically or interactionally-based models of clinical practice. In June 1970, two years after the sudden and unexpected death of its founding Director, Don D. Jackson, MD, research associates at the MRI organized a conference in tribute to him. Gregory Bateson, long time colleague and former collaborator of Jackson, accepted the first Don Jackson award and presented the keynote lecture at the conference. The survival of the original recording of Bateson’s lecture, the First, Don D. Jackson Memorial Address, is due to John H. Weakland. Weakland, the first person asked by Bateson to join him when he formed his infamous Research Team at the beginning of the 1950s, also joined Don Jackson when he first founded the MRI in the late 1950s, as did Jay Haley, and the then recently arrived Paul Watzlawick and Richard Fisch. Weakland preserved numerous reel to reel recordings, paper documents, and films from The Bateson Team era and from the early era of pioneering work of researchers at the MRI. In 1987, at Weakland’s encouragement I began organizing the Don D. Jackson Archive. Then shortly before his death in 1995 Weakland mailed to me three boxes of additional archival materials, including the original reel recording of this lecture by Bateson. Listening to and organizing these materials, and contrasting them with the published work of the early pioneers’ offers an extraordinary opportunity to closely study the evolution of the communication/interactional/cybernetic orientation. Many years ago now, while listening to this recording as it was being transferred to digital format I was struck by its significance. Having listened to it numerous times since, the wisdom and applicability of ideas contained in it, bring me back to listen to it again and again. As background, in a proposal to Don Jackson dated September 15, 1965, Richard Fisch, MD suggested the creation at MRI of a “Brief therapy clinic and evaluation project.” The project was funded and the team began seeing clients early in 1966. In June 1970, when Bateson delivered this lecture John Weakland, Paul Watzlawick, Richard Fisch were in the audience. Jay Haley had left MRI in 1967 to join Salvador Minuchin at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic and, it is likely he was not present for Bateson’s address. The lecture reveals the extent to which the MRI Brief Therapy model is grounded in Bateson’s cybernetic epistemology. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of John Weakland’s introductory comments, followed by the full and unedited transcript of Bateson’s original talk. The significance of Weakland’s introduction and Bateson’s address are self evident and therefore will be presented with a minimum of commentary, with three exceptions made primarily to help orient the reader: (1) several segments of each presentation that are of great relevance to cybernetic theory and application in practice are followed by brief comments; (2) headings have been inserted into Bateson’s talk to orient the reader when he makes important shifts in subject; and (3) components of Bateson’s lecture highly relevant to understanding: . cybernetic epistemology; . constructivism; and/or . exemplify the problem formation/attempted solution framework are highlighted in boldface. KYB 94215—29/6/2007—RAGHAVAN—278047 Introduction By John H. Weakland I want to welcome you all . . . our old friends and associates and many of you whom I hope will become our new friends and associates, or lacking that, since I am pleased to see that many of you are a little younger than we tend to be, at least our critics. The question then arises why am I up here? I will answer this I hope rather briefly. I am here I think to give a little background on this occasion of the first Don D. Jackson Memorial Award, and I think that I have been chosen for this purpose largely . . . because I am the last of the Mohicans. By which I mean I am the last member still active at MRI of a group of people whose joint work laid a good deal of the foundations on the basis of which Don Jackson established the institute originally and on which its work continues. This being the case I could describe the history of this enterprise at some length and how it had become the MRI. I could go on about this particular group which was primarily composed of only five people including beside myself Jay Haley, Dr William Fry, and especially Don Jackson and Gregory Bateson. I could discuss our joint work on human communication, on schizophrenia, on how families operate and fail to operate, and on new approaches to therapy that began to develop but I really do not think that it would be appropriate to go into that at any length. And the reason I do not think so is that this would be about the past and the concern of our group then and its continuation now is toward the future instead . . . I will only say one thing about this past because I believe, though I think many of you may disagree with me, that there is one thing about this particular point that remains equally significant for the future. Our group was very small, only five people, essentially, yet it was remarkably diverse, in terms of our background, our training, our interests, out opinions, and by no means least our personalities. As a result of this our differences were frequent and they were considerable. Nevertheless, largely these took place within a context of a common concern, a common curiosity about human behavior and a belief in the central importance for this of how people communicate and interact with each other and I think as a result of this particular combination of similarity and diversity, our interplay and even our struggles were central for the gradual moving toward some sort of a development of some common fundamental ideas rather than moving rapidly towards some superficially agreed on views, and that is what I most hope may continue in the future: Comment: In the years since the Bateson Team worked together much has been made of the differences that existed between various team members, with numerous after the fact comments made suggesting animosity existed, especially between Gregory Bateson and Jay Haley over the issue of Power (see, for example, Haley and Bateson’s comments in Sluzki and Ransom, 1976; and Hoffman, 1993). Weakland’s comments above go a long way to defuse and contextualize this issue by describing how such strongly held differences furthered rather than took away from the productivity of the team. Weakland’s plea, “our interplay and even our struggles were central for the gradual moving toward some sort of a development of some common fundamental ideas rather than moving rapidly towards some superficially agreed on views, and that is what I most hope may continue in the future,” has profound relevance to continuing efforts to clarify, use, and promulgate the Interactional View. Now probably, I am also here to introduce our speaker because being an old colleague, friend, and former student, as you have heard, it has been thought that I could prepare you for his talk. However, I am not sure this is really either possible nor desirable. Bateson’s cybernetics 861 KYB 94215—29/6/2007—RAGHAVAN—278047 K 36,7/8 862 I could make an attempt at this by discussing his varied career as an anthropologist, formerly as a zoologist, but I do not think I could ever cover but a fraction of the diversity of his work on primitive tribes, on families and psychiatric work, on the social life of dolphins, and anyway even to the extent that I could this would again be a reference essentially to the past, and it is certainly true that just as much as Don Jackson, Gregory Bateson has always been much more concerned about the future. So, on the one hand I cannot tell you what he is about to say and in any case I very strongly suspect from experience that rather than that he would prefer to meet and to stimulate all our accustomed and often stereotyped thinking with some surprises and challenges of his own. So, I will only say to you, here is Gregory Bateson, to speak for him self – Gregory. The first Don D. Jackson memorial address By Gregory Bateson Let me say that it is an extraordinary pleasure as well as an honor to be here tonight. I have been around Palo Alto for the last two or three days seeing old faces, old collaborators, seeing where the problems that we started what, 14 years ago, I guess, have led. And I miss Don. Don had a quickness, and a lightness, in touch that is I think very important in handling problems of human behavior. I think he might have thought that some of our antics this evening a little funny and to come up to this platform and lighten our procedures a little. It would have been nice. He was historically of course, a very important person. His original paper on family homeostasis was certainly one of the first, perhaps the first, major statement about the family as a system. And I thought I would talk to you about the implications of thinking of human groups, families, even the human individual, as systemically organized and what this means. And I thought that I would particularly organize the talk around the notion of power. On the limitations and danger of power Power is something which a very large number of people believe in and a very large number of people want. And if you want it, and if you believe in it, and you can find other people who will believe in it too, you can in a certain sense, have it. But, they say it corrupts. What does all this mean? First, of all, is the world the sort of thing in which the word power is an appropriate word to use to describe what goes on between people? The word comes from a physical chemical universe in which power is very definitely measurable in foot-pounds or in foot-pounds over time and that is a perfectly clear and meaningful concept. From this concept, we take off and make a metaphor, a way of talking about what goes on between people, which certainly is a very poor copy of that which travels over wires and lights those lamps. The copy is a dangerous one and of course, there is a whole mass of psychological thinking, practically the whole of Freudian theory, which in the end is rooted in theories of “energy.” And I have a kind of suspicion that these metaphors are not only wrong but also dangerous. Causation is organized in circuit structures What sort of a world is it that we are talking about? First, of all it is clearly a world in which causation is organized into circuit structures. If I say certain things to you which you either agree with or disagree with, and you respond to what I say in the end this KYB 94215—29/6/2007—RAGHAVAN—278047 comes back to me, either heightening my reputation or disgracing me and turning me into a subject of mockery. But neither the height of reputation nor contempt has anything to do with wattage, power in that sense. All that we have said is that if you throw your bread upon the waters it will come back to you perhaps dry, perhaps wet. The world is on the whole a circuit structured. Because it is structured in circuits we find that on the whole, if only we would leave it alone, the world is on the whole self corrective, and such a system as a redwood forest or a coral reef, if you would reduce one of the species of insects or plants in it by 10 percent and come back again five years later you will find that it has adjusted itself to about the figure that it was at before. If you import a number of that species and raised the operation of that species by 10 percent and come back in five years you will find its about down to where it was before. The system is self-corrective and it is self-corrective because it is circuit structured because what happens to this species, affects that species which affects that species which comes back and balances things up in various complex ways most of which are not understood. This is the central fact that ecologists are now talking about. Now, if that is the sort of world that we live in and we approach the redwood forest and say we want more weevils of a given species out of this forest, what is going to happen? Either we are going to over crop, kill, take away too many of those weevils or we are going to boost the thing in some way to try to get more weevils and whatever we do we shall in fact be arguing not in circuits but in lineal sequences. If I do this then that will happen then that will happen and there will be more of whatever it is I want to take out of the forest. I do not know why anybody would want weevils but they might. Maybe it would be lumber they would be wanting. But the case is still the same. The point is that if you think in a certain way and that way of thinking which is the “if a then b then c, and we want c so we will go a, b, c.” If that way of thinking is not in fact a reasonably good mirror, representation, of the way in which the thing you’re attacking is organized you will wreck its organization, it is that simple: Comment: Using simple cybernetic and cybernetic of cybernetic epistemology, Bateson outlines what became the essence of the problem formation/attempted solution framework, and the inevitable ecologically destructive ramifications of shortsighted actions aimed at making things better. Now, what sort of a business is this? First, of all, obviously when you get above the level of redwood forests and coral reefs to consider human communities you again face much the same sort of problem, that what you do to increase the number of trolley cars in the city is going to reflect around and alter all the other variables and set off corrective resistances and so forth. The status quo at any given moment in such a system always contains self-corrective devices which will tend to perpetuate it. Example one The sort of thing that is very familiar is that if a social system, say, imposes prohibition on itself changes will be set on foot to keep constant that variable which prohibition would other wise change. That is the concentration of alcohol in circulation of the system will tend to stay the same in spite of prohibition legislation. In order to maintain that constancy a new trade will be invented, that of the bootlegger, and in order to keep the bootleggers in order a new branch of the police force will be invented and so on. It will ramify like roots of a tree through the whole social structure. The result will be that when you have had prohibition for a few years, to take it off will Bateson’s cybernetics 863 KYB 94215—29/6/2007—RAGHAVAN—278047 K 36,7/8 864 be a great nuisance to everybody and the total system will react to try to keep constant certain relations between criminals and police that were established during prohibition. You keep on trying to keep constant something, which was so before and is interrupted under the new system. Now if that’s the sort of world you live in there is then a very serious question as to what we mean by the word power. Comment: Attempted solution serve to maintain the status quo, becoming self perpetuating and ecologically destructive games without end. Example two – a family Now if you work with families and I used to be doing this here, you find families, for example, where one of the, an adolescent, say, is what is called psychotic – is troubled which the other members of the family are a trouble to that member and that member is a trouble to the others and you work along and you start to give that so-called identified patient a little more courage you will find first of all that you get protest from the other members that they tend to make those moves which will put the member down again and then they will say, even articulately, “I can see Joe’s so much better but why is he getting so hostile?” And the battle will develop and if they cannot win then you may see the whole family swing around, focus on another sibling and put the heat on there, trying to maintain constant that which you as a therapist are trying to change. Consequences and implications of believing in power All this means that power is something quite different from what it is usually thought of as being. One of the things that it means, obviously, is that if you believe that there is such a thing as one-way power as distinct from round and round interaction, and if you seem to get it, then you will get the phenomenon called power corrupts. It corrupts not only the man who thinks he has it; it also corrupts those who think that he has it, who gives it to him. You see this is a myth which people can believe in and which has . . . the belief in it has very profound effects upon what happens. That must have such effects even though the myth is a very considerable distortion of what really does happen. And partly the myth is a dangerous myth because it is a distortion of what can happen. Now if this be so then it would follow that it is exceedingly dangerous to put into positions involving important decision, positions of high responsibility, people who believe in the myth of power: Comment: Emphasis on constructivist and the second order cybernetic influence of belief, is a central theme present throughout the writings of Bateson and other members of the Palo Alto Group (Bateson, 1955, 1961; Jackson, 1955, 1960). Example three – anthropology I did considerable amount of fieldwork before World War II in Bali, in the Dutch Indies. And Bali has an exemplary social organization. It is ruled, the village, is ruled by its citizens who have an order of seniority. You become a full citizen when you marry. You and your wife are then jointly a member of the committee of the whole, so to speak. You climb up that ladder of members as other people cease to be members, you move up and there is a group of two couples, who are the top of the list under them the next two to make four couples, and these people are responsible. They are both religious KYB 94215—29/6/2007—RAGHAVAN—278047 leaders and secular leaders in many ways. But there is absolutely no way in which you can alter anybodies position on that list. You drop off if you do not have any children, if you have one child, we will say a male, you are given another five years membership in which to have a female child. If you have another male child, well you are given another five years after that. If it becomes perfectly evident that you are not going to have a child of each sex you will drop off the list. When your youngest child marries you drop off the list, when your first great grandchild is born, you drop off the list. There are various sorts of ceremonial impurity, which will remove you from the list. Bigamy will remove you from the list. If the ceremonial impurity or the bigamy should cease you go back on the list and you go back into precisely the slot you were in before. There is no possibility of political maneuvering to try to get above or below anybody else on the list. This is, you see, really a democratic system. And it is designed to assign power to persons who are qualified for it by the fact that their youngest child is not yet married, their great grandchild is not yet born, they do not have the various sorts of ceremonial impurity that would disqualify them, but they are in general totally uninterested in power. When the village meets to make a decision the citizens try to push the leaders into making a decision, the leaders try to push the citizens into making suggestions, and if the leaders make a decision which is not supported by the citizens they are fined. And they are fined quite a considerable sum. It works very nicely, but the system does not change at all easily. I do not know why anybody would want systems to change. If you want to make, want something to happen, as we did, we wanted to get the village orchestra out one afternoon when a musicologist was visiting us. It was explained that, the village orchestra performs on such and such calendric days as it might be Easter, Christmas, Michaelmas, and so forth. This was not one of those calendric days and they were sorry. But the heads had said that they would get the orchestra out and they got fined for having jumped the gun; they were corrected by their people. Now, the question you see if you believe in power, if you think the way the belief in power encourages people to think, you then start on various sorts of interaction with the system which tend to get more and more violent. You tend to escalate in various ways, and this is where things start to get interesting. I mean to a diagnostician. Example four and five – DDT and automobiles Limitations of foresight: how attempted solutions can become future disasters We are in the position in which today we also believe that we have a power over the world around us by way of our technology. That is, if we want more food out of our environment, we believe that we can get it by the use of insecticides to keep down the pests, fertilizers to make the squashes fatter and greener, and other devices. But we are still up against the same sort of problem and I think it is worthwhile to think for a moment of the extraordinary repetitive nature of the ecological problem. We have a population explosion on our hands. Out of population pressure we invent ways of increasing food supply, or we invent ways of moving people around better, the automobile, or we increase food supply by the invention of DDT. Fine, the history of these two objects is very much the same. First, of all the invention turns out to be enormously successful. A major industry is built up to make whatever it is, the DDT or the automobiles, etc. That system flourishes long enough so that the population pressure which it was designed to relieve is freed. That is you add DDT to your Bateson’s cybernetics 865 KYB 94215—29/6/2007—RAGHAVAN—278047 K 36,7/8 total system, your population now rises over a period of 10-20 years, and about the time when you have therefore become totally dependant on the DDT, because your population has now risen to a point where you cannot do without it. You discover that the DDT is either toxic or immoral or fattening. You then face a very unpleasant situation in which you are addicted to what you thought was a source of power and now becomes an element of dependency, and a toxic one at that. 866 Timing: a logic for “going slow” and recommending non-change The timing is a little interesting. DDT, for example, was discovered as an insecticide in 1939 by a Swiss named Muller, who got a Nobel Prize for it. It was then a source of major usefulness in World War II and no doubt saved thousands of lives, and in the years following changed the entire vital statistics of the tropics in a way that was quite fantastic. In the year that DDT was introduced to Ceylon the death rate fell from, I forget now, the order of 28 to of the order of 18, something of this sort per thousand, a fall of a third. OK, now Rachel Carson’s book came out, anyone know the date, about 1961, 1962? And this was already after the main scientific knowledge was available in the scientific world. That is to say that we really knew about 58 to 60 that DDT was a major toxic danger and that the birds certainly were gone and that much of our surrounding living world would be doomed. In 1969-1970, we began to think seriously about controlling the DDT, and maybe in the next three years we will manage to control it some. That is how the timing goes. Very slow lag, in which power is enormously reduced by the self-corrective devices of the status quo. You see it is not only the redwood forests that are ecologically organized. It is also the pesticide industry. They too have their ecological system, their corrective devices, which will see to it that when we are committed to a line of conduct it will be excessively difficult to change that line of conduct. One of the interesting things about all of this, I do not know whether we shall live through it, we may, there is also the nuclear industry and others. What we are going to be doing is creating various sorts of things which will correct for various sorts of pressures, especially population pressure. As the DDT permits then the population to rise and having corrected we do not know what to do next. You see it is as if you are dealing with a mind. You could put it, if you like, that there is an old man in the sky, perhaps with a beard, who looks down and when he sees a species quarrelling with its ecology, he heaves a sigh and regretfully sends the fallout. But, of course, it is not necessary to imagine the old man in the sky because the fallout in fact is created by the species, that was quarreling with its ecology and the whole system has a self-correctedness about it which we try to escape from. Do not forget that the smog is what the advertisers might call nature’s way. As population increases more or less inevitably as any variable any measurable in the world increases, it will in the end produce changes in other variables, other values, which will tend to stop the increase, it is that simple. As population increases one of the things which it produces as a byproduct is smog. If it produces enough smog the smog becomes lethal and controls the population increase. This probably is the most humane way of solving the population explosion. There may be more humane ways, I do not know. We do not know of them. We know that on the whole, smog attacks the urban rather than the rural population. It is not likely to exterminate the species because it is too localized, whereas the atomic stuff of course, is much more dangerous. KYB 94215—29/6/2007—RAGHAVAN—278047 There is something to be said for smog, and not disturbing it or cleaning it up until you know what you are going to do with the population problem; the moment you have an idea what to do with the population problem then start cleaning up the smog. Our power to elect pathways is not very great. Our power to control each other is not very great. The mess that we get into when we start to believe that we have power is formidable. Bateson’s cybernetics 867 The Epistemologically Flawed and Dangerous Fiction of “I” And one of the very severe troubles that lie at the root of this whole business is the separation of self from that with which we deal. We think “I” can cut down that tree. Or we think, “We” can beat that other nation; we can control the colored, or the lower classes. All these statements, which are essential on the same structural base, happen to be very largely nonsense. We are in general not separate from that thing which we think we can control. A much more correct way of thinking about the problem is of self as part of a system which includes self and that which you’re trying to control. It is a difference between me versus you and me as part of something in this room, an effort, a joint effort perhaps to think straight. My contributions to that effort may be right or wrong, your contributions may be right or wrong. We may have a chance to discuss them, and the whole thing moves as an interactive business rather than moving as a unilateral control of any kind whatsoever. Now, perhaps the most interesting focal point of this whole “something versus the rest,” as opposed to “something as part of a total,” is in the case of mind versus body. Example five – the alcoholic I am the captain of my soul, says the alcoholic who is perfectly sure he can control his drinking. As long as his battle with the drink is fairly fierce and clear, he may be able to stay in that position. But, when he starts to win that battle, to feel that he is not really being tempted by the booze very much anymore, he suddenly finds that he has a glass of alcohol in his hand. That is, his control, “I am the captain of my soul,” or whatever it is, only holds up to the point at which his imaginary antagonist keeps on fighting. At the moment the imaginary antagonist stops fighting his control ceases and he is off on a binge. He does not have control. That is, I have been talking first about control, say between persons, or control between people and the environment, and now I have moved to the question of control within the person. Do I have control over me and in what sense? And every psychiatrist I think knows that I have very limited control over me. Whether any would be arguable, whether that control works at any immediate level would be exceedingly doubtful. I can in a sense, and perhaps the philosophers would not allow me to say this, train myself in certain ways. That is I can go jogging and can do enough jogging so that when I start to go up my Mount Tamalpais (outside San Francisco), I will be able to get to the top without panting as much as I would have expected. I can make certain changes in acclimation and adjustment, perhaps. The philosophers I think would say no. On the other hand, if I, what shall I say, begin to boast to myself, begin to fall under the illusion that I have an order of control that I do not have then I have less than I ever had. And all this, of course, is very relevant to all the work which we used to be doing, and which the MRI is still doing, with family therapy and the rest of it. The problem is how to let an individual, a system, achieve its adjustments. KYB 94215—29/6/2007—RAGHAVAN—278047 K 36,7/8 868 Example six – anxiety and soothing an infant If you were dealing with a small baby and you are in a hurry, for some reason, you will find that things go wrong in the relationship to the small baby. If you approach the small baby with the frame of mind as if you have infinite time, and infinite attention to give to it, now, you will find the baby will go to sleep very quickly. If you approach the baby with the notion, “it’s got to go to sleep in the next five minutes or I don’t know what I shall do,” you will find the baby is awake ten minutes later and you are still puzzled what to do. In general, the problem is not exactly a problem of surrender but a problem of accurate assessment of what order of control, if any, you have and mostly you do not have much and when you have agreed finally that you do not have much, you may find that things go much more smoothly. Not merely by the fact of your, “giving in,” as it’s called but by the fact of you’re, “going with,” whatever it is. Example seven – our ecology Further, implication of the belief in power and the separation of I and Thou We were in Austria at a small conference and we had there Barry Commoner the ecologist and a number of people from various sorts of behavioral science and mathematics to consider these problems of control essentially. A psychologist in the group gave us a paper on the history of consciousness and the nature of awareness and purpose that people thought they had in various epochs. And he reached the point of the Renaissance and he discussed Leonardo, and particularly the painting of the Virgin of the Rocks with this, you know, holy family in the foreground and a fantastic Renaissance landscape behind. And our psychologist made the point that the extraordinary advance in the Renaissance period, Renaissance Italy, was the degree of separation between the family and the landscape. I mumbled something about this sounded somehow familiar. And Barry Commoner, the great defender of our ecology, came in with all his guns and said, “Burt,” which was the psychologist’s name, “What do you hold sacred?” Burt mumbled, I was chairman and was in a position to force him to an answer and rather uncomfortably he said, “The family I guess.” And Barry Commoner said, “Burt if you don’t hold the frogs in the waterfalls as sacred as the human family you’re doomed.” That is about the position we’re in. If we set it up as the family versus the frogs in the waterfalls we are probably doomed. We have been setting it up that way, as man versus his environment, ever since about 1800 and extremely clearly with Darwinian evolution, in which it was assumed that survival of the fittest argues that the unit of survival is the species or the family unit or the subspecies or something. Now, that way of thinking, which then sets the biological chunk against the circuit structure in which it is a part is, I believe, a lethal idea for any society that has enough technology to put the idea into practice. You cannot both think that way and be able to act according to your thought. If you only have a half-arced technology you are still safe. But the moment you have an effective technology and you think that way you have got to correct your thinking. There is no way of getting rid of the technology that I know of. The engineers are much too powerful. So the only thing to do is to change your attitude towards it, or it always ends in your death; it is that sort anyway. I do not know that I want to say much more; I think I have said it. I will say this more. That it is a reasonable estimate of an even chance within the next 20 years that we destroy everything that we have been calling civilization. KYB 94215—29/6/2007—RAGHAVAN—278047 The sort of change I am asking for is not the sort of change that happens within 20 or 30 years. Obviously things are moving very rapidly. We hear now about the DDT and the Antarctic penguins. We hear nowadays that the pelicans of California have not had a baby for three years. Some thousands of pelicans, they cannot make eggshells. We have not yet heard of any serious disruption of the human reproductive system. It is not at all improbable. We do not have long. Bateson’s cybernetics 869 Conclusion The ideas presented in this lecture were not new on the part of Bateson; by 1970 he had researched, written about, and taught these ideas for well more than a decade. Members of the Palo Alto Group, Weakland, Jackson, Haley, and Fry, who had worked with Bateson during the decade long series of research projects out of which these ideas emerged, and Watzlawick and Fisch also had heard and read them before. To this writer, however, Bateson’s June 1970 address at this MRI conference, when the Brief Therapy Team were four years deep into the process of creating their model, is a vividly clear and uncompromising articulation of cybernetic epistemology and its implications. Within the subsequent four years the MRI Brief Therapy Team would continue to apply in clinical research the use of these ideas, and formally publish the problem formation – problem resolution model which is their legacy. Bateson had significant theoretical differences from some of his early colleagues, especially Jay Haley and perhaps to a lesser extent others. The differences show clearly in this address. In this talk, Bateson offered to his colleagues a lucid critique of the use of the metaphor of “power” in descriptions of interactional and therapeutic process, and a warning about the potentially disastrous consequences of shortsighted interventions. It is as true today as it was 37 years ago that too few scholars in the sciences including the field of psychotherapy, to include many practitioners of MRI Brief Therapy, take Bateson’s criticism seriously; while some such as John Weakland, Bradford Keeney, and others understood and embraced Bateson’s warning. Thank you Gregory Bateson, Don Jackson, John Weakland, Richard Fisch and Paul Watzlawick for articulating so clearly a non-power based understanding of problems, how they are perpetuated, and how to help desist from problem maintaining behavior. I earnestly hope Gregory Bateson was wrong about our species ability to change and our chances for survival. With pollution and global warming, oil and other addictions, the non self referential tendency to blame others and the current dismal state of international affairs, optimism may well be unfounded. References Bateson, G. (1955), A Theory of Play and Fantasy, in Bateson, G. (1972), Steps to An Ecology of Mind, Ballantine Books, New York, NY. Bateson, G. (1961), Minimal Requirements for a Theory of Schizophrenia, in Bateson, G. (1972), Steps to An Ecology of Mind, Ballantine Books, New York, NY. de Shazer, S. (1994), Words were Originally Magic, Norton, New York, NY. Fisch, R. and Schlanger, R. (1999), Brief Therapy with Intimidating Cases – Changing the Unchangeable, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA. Fisch, R., Weakland, J., Watzlawick, P. and Bodin, A. (1972), “On unbecoming family therapists”, in Ferber, A., Mendelson, M. and Napier, A. (Eds), The Book of Family Therapy, Science House, New York, NY, pp. 597-617. KYB 94215—29/6/2007—RAGHAVAN—278047 K 36,7/8 870 Fisch, R., Weakland, J. and Segal, L. (1982), The Tactics of Change – Doing Therapy Briefly, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA. Hoffman, L. (1993), Exchanging Voices, Karnac Books, London. Jackson, D. (1955), “The therapists personality in the therapy of schizophrenics”, in Ray, W. (Ed.) (2005) Don D. Jackson – Essays from the Dawn of an Era, Zeig, Tucker, Theisan, Phoeniz, AZ. Jackson, D. (1960), “Introduction”, in Jackson, D. (Ed.), The Etiology of Schizophrenia, Basic Books, New York, NY, also in Ray, W. (Ed.), (2005), Don D. Jackson – Essays from the Dawn of an Era, Zeig, Tucker, Theisan, Phoeniz, AZ. Keeney, B. (1983), Aesthetics of Change, Guilford Press, New York, NY. Ray, W. and Keeney, B. (1993), Resource Focused Therapy, Karnac, London. Sluzki, C. and Ransom, D. (1976), Double Bind: The Foundation of the Communicational Approach to the Family, Grune & Stratton, New York, NY. Watzlawick, P. (Ed.) (1984), The Invented Reality – How Do We Know What We Believe We Know?, W.W. Norton, New York, NY. Watzlawick, P. and Nardone, G. (Eds) (1997), Terapia breve stratepica, Raffaello Cortina, Milan. Watzlawick, P., Weakland, R. and Fisch, R. (1974), Change: Principals of Problem Formation & Problem Resolution, W.W. Norton, New York, NY. Weakland, J. and Ray, W. (Eds) (1995), Propagations – Thirty Years of Influence from the Mental Research Institute (MRI), Haworth, New York, NY. Weakland, J., Fisch, R., Watzlawick, P. and Bodin, A. (1974), “Brief therapy: focused problem resolution”, Family Process, Vol. 13, pp. 141-68. Further reading Ray, W. and Don, D. (2005), Don D. Jackson – Essays from the Dawn of An Era, Zeig, Tucker, & Theisan, Phoenix, AZ. Watzlawick, P. and Weakland, J. (1977), The Interactional View – Studies at the Mental Research Institute, 1965-1974, W.W. Norton, New York, NY. Corresponding author Wendel A. Ray can be contacted at: waray@bellsouth.net To purchase reprints of this article please e-mail: reprints@emeraldinsight.com Or visit our web site for further details: www.emeraldinsight.com/reprints
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