Double Bind to Video Therapy

THE DOUBLE BIND – FAMILY THERAPY –TOWARD A MEDIA PSYCHOLOGY

"A Moebius strip is a one-sided surface made by taking a long rectangle of paper, giving it a half-twist, and joining its ends. Any two points on the strip can be connected by starting at one point and tracing a line to the other without crossing over a inside. The inside is the outside. Here the power of video is used to take in your own outside. When you see yourself on tape, you see the image you are presenting to the world. When you see yourself watching yourself on tape, you are seeing your real self, your "inside.""

Paul Ryan – Everyone's Moebius Strip

To briefly recap:

In a previous chapter we learned that Alfred Korzybski argued that the etiology of schizophrenia was due to a confusion of levels of abstraction. Korzybski maintained that the schizophrenic confused the concrete and the abstract (the map for the territory). Korzybski identified this with Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell’s Theory of Logical Types.

Korzybski built a plastic diagram, the Structural Differential, as a therapeutic aid for those who suffer from category confusion. The structural differential was Korzybski’s attempt to establish a new technical standard in the treatment of a condition caused by confusion of logical types. In the same chapter, we established that Bateson also identified schizophrenia as the confusion of levels of abstraction, and that he too referenced Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell’s Theory of Logical Types.

In 1952, Bateson established a research project at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto, entitled The Role of Paradoxes of Abstraction in Communication. Bateson’s team of researchers including anthropologist John Weakland, communications analyst Jay Haley, and psychiatrist William Fry. This research pursued Bateson’s interest in the degree to which the interaction between individuals within groups was formative of the self, and investigated the role confusion of levels of abstraction and paradox played in psychological disorders . Just as the structural differential served as an iterative device which established the relation between the concrete event and its symbolic representation, the video system will become central to therapeutic practice and we move toward the 1960s.

Three significant issues arose from the work of Bateson’s Palo Alto group which have a bearing on the development of the video culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

1)the development of family therapy (which seeks to identify cyclical patterns of family interaction through group work)

2)the development of double-bind theory (which has its origins in the conflict of levels of abstraction) and

3)the use of film and video in the execution and analysis of family therapy sessions.

At this stage I must state the obvious: schizophrenia is not recursive condition, it is not best described as a “communication problem”, it is not derived from the confusion of levels of abstraction and, contrary to the findings of Bateson and his research group, it does not originate with paradoxical patterns of behaviour instigated by the mother.

In 1956 Bateson and the team published the influential paper which, nevertheless, framed schizophrenia in precisely those terms. Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia described the “double-bind” as “a situation in which no matter what a person does, he ‘can't win.’” In a typical example, a child is presented with a paradox: the family member closest to them tells them they love them but their actions contradict this claim. This sets off a pattern in which the child attempts to resolve the paradox with still more paradoxical forms of communication.

“[I]f the schizophrenia of our hypothesis is essentially a result of family interaction, it should be possible to arrive a priori at a formal description of these sequences of experience which would induce such a symptomatology.”

In Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia, Bateson et al are clear that confusion of levels of abstraction is essential to any human communication. There are innumerable instances in which it is used in everyday life: “play, non-play, fantasy, sacrament, metaphor” […] “humour”, “simulation of friendliness”, “learning” and learning to learn, alongside non-verbal modes of communication (smiles, shrugs, hugs, nods, winks) which are also highly abstract. The non-schizophrenic is able to navigate this network of signs through interpreting the context in which they are spoken or enacted. The schizophrenic, however (according to Bateson et al), “[…] exhibits weakness in three areas of such function:

(a) He [sic] has difficulty in assigning the correct communicational mode to the messages he receives from other persons.

(b) He has difficulty in assigning the correct communicational mode to those messages which he himself utters or emits nonverbally.

(c) He has difficulty in assigning the correct communicational mode to his own thoughts, sensations, and percepts.”

For the schizophrenic of the double-bind, the channels that link the metaphor to the object it describes are confused. The authors give the example of this syllogism to illustrate the point:

Men die.

Grass dies.

Men are grass.

In a certain context this syllogism might illustrate how dependent humans are on negotiating different levels of abstraction to make sense of the world, and how central metaphor is to human communication but:

“[t]he peculiarity of the schizophrenic is not that he uses metaphors, but that he uses unlabeled metaphors. He has special difficulty in handling signals of that class whose members assign Logical Types to other signals.” .

In this scheme the schizophrenic has difficulty dealing with the inherent ambiguity of language. Bateson et al give a vivid illustration of how the double-bind might be negotiated by a non-schizophrenic and account for why a schizophrenic is unable to deal with it. They recount the story of the Zen master who, holding a stick in front of his student, instructs the student:

"If you say this stick is real, I will strike you with it. If you say this stick is not real, I will strike you with it. If you don't say anything, I will strike you with it."

Here the Zen master is inviting the student to read the context, and to act in a manner appropriate to that context (snatch the stick away, accept the blows of the master, call the master’s bluff &c). The schizophrenic of the double-bind is unable to make such a response.

Here the parallel with Korzybski’s structural differential becomes clearer still. If the etiology of schizophrenia is within the family context then methods which makes the patterns of behaviour apparent to the family members would be highly beneficial. If the family member could witness the miscommunication, they might more readily understand their own place in a matrix of communication. This is a cybernetic vision of therapy, in which all parties are invited to establish a new relation. Just as the structural differential is used as a corrective to errors of interpretation, the video system can be used as a corrective to patterns of behaviour which generate confusion of levels of abstraction. This represents a dramatic break with the "talking cure" of traditional psychiatry, and the implications of this form of therapy does not stop with the patient. For the process to be meaningful, the therapist must also acknowledge their part in the ecology of behaviour they are immersed in.

The shift from one-to-one therapy to family therapy in the 1950s corresponded with the development of technologies in which interaction could be observed and reflected upon. Milton Berger (a follower of Bateson), had incorporated video as a component in his own psychoanalytic practice since 1965. Berger edited an early textbook on video as therapy – and wrote a piece in Radical Software outlining how the techniques provided “[a] unique opportunity for working through alienation from self by repeated replay of recorded data.” The logic of feedback as an agent of self-realisation had been established as an artifice of the apparatus at the inception of video (indeed it might be understood as an outcome of any feedback medium). In Guerrilla TV Michael Shemberg had outlined how, when people apprehend their own image in the fabulous loop de loop, they would understand their own place in the larger media ecology; just as William Burroughs had taught that replaying audio of oneself (or taking an auditing session with an e-meter) can help remove “various misleading data”; just as for Alfred Korzybski’s Structural Differential could help one recognise ones place within a hierarchy of abstraction. The video tape, because of its very structure as a feedback machine, invites a relation to the recursive.

THE REOCCURRENCE OF LAWRENCE KUBIE – A MIRROR WITH A MEMORY

This apprehension of the self as other – this video-activated mirror stage – was recognised by many in the psychiatric profession who, with the advent of the video recorder, saw the opportunity for the patient to see themselves as others see them and for the psychoanalyst to see themselves too.

Dialectics Of Liberation Conference 1967 (Bateson, top left)

The cybernetician and psychoanalyst, Lawrence Kubie (see previous) explored the psychoanalytical implications of video in his 1969 paper, Some Aspects of the Significance to Psychoanalysis of the Exposure of a Patient to the Televised Audiovisual Reproduction of His Activities. In this text, Kubie gives an account of a self-interview he conducted over a video system. He then plays the footage back, making detailed notes of his experience as he does so. Although the account is given in the third person, the biographical details match those of Kubie. For Kubie, the process uncovered “layers of identification” which intensified with each re-watching.

Kingsley Hall 1965

On the pages of Radical Software, analyst Harry A. Wilmer gave an account of his use of the Portapak as a therapeutic tool for drug addicts. In his article, Feed- back: TV Monologue Psychotherapy, video feedback again serves as a medium for self-reflexivity…..[continue]"Television helps mixed-up kids get in focus - on and off camera.", the byline reads.

[...] And the tendency to understand video as a medium of self-knowledge, and knowledge of context, crossed over to the counterculture automatically.

R.D. Laing's early research in which medical staff worked alongside patients . ... which led to the residential treatment centre Kingsley Hall the "anti-psychiatry" movement...