Bateson’s cultural anthropology had always been, in a broad sense, psychological. As early as 1934, his papers for the Congres International
des Sciences Anthropologiques et Ethnologiques (1934b 1934c 1934d) show his interest in the interaction of individual psychology and cultural ethos.
In the same year, the twenty-one-year-old Bateson (already concerned about the increasing threat of war with Germany) was writing to the editor of The Times7to point out that anthropologists and psychologists should be combining their efforts to question ideas of the innate savagery of mankind. He cited anthropological evidence from cultures that are almost entirely nonaggressive and others that have so incorporated aggressive tendencies into ritual behavior that they have no need to engage in war. Bateson suggested that British preparations for war were evidence of fear produced by cultural factors in that society. When writing Naven in 1935 one of his main concerns had been the reciprocal effect of cultural “structure” and general “ethos” on individual behavior and cultural norms. He speculated then on the possible application of his concept of schismogenesis to the treatment of schizophrenic patients.
His collaboration with Margaret Mead on Balinese Character was primarily concerned with individual and group psychology.
The beginning of the war meant, for Bateson, an urgent focus on the psychological processes that function in the context of international conflict. In August 1939 Bateson and Mead jointly drafted a letter (signed by Margaret Mead only) to Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the then President of the United States. They urged that she should encourage the President to intervene in “the present world crisis” by presenting a plan to Hitler that might, in view of the “peculiar aspects of [his] psychology,” divert him toward becoming a great leader toward peace, a role that could be “represented as more active, more construc-tive, more magnificent than the courses which it is desired that he abandon.” Hitler’s invasion of Poland, less than a week after this letter was sent, preempted any response from President Roosevelt and precip-itated the onset of war (Yans-McLoughlin 1986b, 3–8).
Bateson’s 1940 address to the Eastern Psychological Association (1941e) related frustration and aggression to the societal processes in New Guinea and Bali. His collaboration with Margaret Mead produced Principles of Morale Building (Bateson and Mead 1941f), a report on methods of influencing individuals and groups toward desirable attitudes in war time. Further works produced during the war years include papers on the links between national character and morale, culture and person-ality, the deliberate cultivation of democratic values, American stereotypes and attitudes toward other nations engaged in the war, analysis of German film material that was intended to get Nazi attitudes accepted by the population (1943b, reprint 1980), and the development
of suitable psychological training for dealing with the postwar situation.8 In all these papers Bateson shows an increasing interest in psycholog-ical topics.
After the war and two short periods of teaching at the New School for Social Research in New York and at Harvard University, Bateson took his anthropological, cybernetic, and psychological perspectives into the field of clinical psychiatry. His first post was as Lecturer in Medical Anthro-pology within the new Psychology Department of the University of Cali-fornia Medical School. The core purpose of the appointment was to work with the Swiss psychiatrist Jurgen Ruesch on a study of psychiatric com-munication. The collaboration was, at times, fraught with conflict.
Bateson “had difficulty with timing” and was inclined to lecture on topics other than the lecture title. In their joint research he was “restlessly agnostic” about psychological theories and unhappy about the way that, in clinical practice, pragmatic action was so often preferred to anything grounded in theory. He was inclined, when confronted with administra-tive requirements, to “immerse himself in the abstract realm of ideas and science.” The needs of patients conflicted, as Bateson saw it, with the process of research (Lipset 1982, 185–86). In spite of these tensions, the research was fruitful, the two men producing from this dialectical process their related, if separate, chapters in Communication: The Social Matrix of Society (Bateson and Ruesch 1951a). Bateson’s chapters focus on cyber-netic approaches to understanding the coding of information, the con-ventions of communication “where validity depends on belief,” an epistemological approach to psychiatric thinking, and on what he saw as the contemporary “convergence of science and psychiatry.”
Between 1954 and 1959 the Batesons (Gregory had by then married his second wife Betty) were resident in Palo Alto, California. Funded by grants from the Macy Foundation, Bateson was leading a team of researchers working on “schizophrenic communication.” Their best-known, still extensively cited, and influential contribution to psychiatry is the “double-bind” theory of schizophrenia. This sees the schizophrenic patient as the product of a cybernetic family process that places him in an intolerable emotional situation where whatever attitudes or responses he exhibits will be unacceptable to the family as a whole. Bateson later extended the double-bind concept to a whole range of processes including innovative work in family therapy (then a new field), depen-dency and addiction, theories of play, armaments races, international relations, and environmental crises. During this period Bateson edited and published a schizophrenic patient’s own journal: Perceval’s Narrative:
A Patient’s Account of His Psychosis, 1830–1832 (1961a).