THE DOUBLE BIND THEORY

THE DOUBLE BIND THEORY: STILL CRAZY-MAKING AFTER ALL THESE YEARS
Paul Gibney
With fifty years having passed since Gregory Bateson and his colleagues published their famous paper, ‘Towards a Theory of Schizophrenia’, it is an opportune time to review the theory and its clinical relevance today. Bateson’s team began with an interest in how the identity and functioning of self regulating systems was maintained through mechanisms of information, control and feedback. This work foreshadowed and gave momentum to the development of family therapy, with several members of the original research group later forming the initial schools of family therapy. Bateson, accompanied by Haley, Weakland and Jackson, formed a complex picture of the reciprocal complementariness and escalations that form family life. The ‘double bind hypothesis’ and ‘the schizophrenic dilemma’ were seen as part of a continuum of human experience of communication, that involved intense relationships and the necessity to discriminate between orders of message. Fifty years on, the double bind hypothesis of Gregory Bateson and his research group still offers ongoing insights, cause for reflection, an area and methodology of research, and proposes interventions that dismantle pathology and offer hope of new, more functional pathways. online pdf