Mind and nature gregory bateson biography
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New York: E. P. Dutton. He was concerned with advancing the search for fundamental principles of structure and process in those sciences, and for the classes of data and kinds of observation proper to the illumination of those fundamentals. Bateson's early work on the patterning of culture, of the deutero truths (that is, what is true is what a particular community agrees to be true) that grew out of the structure of experience and learning (deuterolearning) in such communities, shares with the anthropology of the time two morally significant assumptions.
. He repeated his messages innumerable times to innumerable audiences, the redundancy being, he felt, necessary if what he had to say was to be truly heard. He attended Charterhouse School from 1917 to 1921. . From 1931 to 1937 he was a fellow at Cambridge[2] and then moved to the United States.
Bateson and Mead separated in 1947, and were divorced in 1950.[5] Bateson then married his second wife, Elizabeth "Betty" Sumner (1919-1992), in 1951.[6] She was the daughter of the Episcopalian Bishop of Chicago, Walter Taylor Sumner.
We must, he says, learn to 'think as Nature thinks,' if we are to learn to live in harmony on the planet. [1972:xix]
In Bateson's view the heuristic concepts generally employed in social science explanation are in a class with the "dormitive principle" made to account for opium's soporific qualities in Moliere's The Doctor In Spite of Himself.
. The psychodynamic model of the nineteenth century added trauma from a patient’s past to the list of possible causes.
Taking his metaphor here from religious language, art, for example, is "part of man's quest for grace." He thought of grace as involving the integration of "diverse parts of the mind - especially those multiple levels of which one extreme is called 'consciousness' and the other the 'unconscious' (1972:129). [1972:452]
Bateson sometimes used the terms pleroma and creatura, which he borrowed from Jung (who claimed to be following Gnostic usage) for the two domains.
. Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred. University Of Chicago Press.
Full double bind requires several conditions to be met:
- a) The victim of double bind receives contradictory injunctions or emotional messages on different levels of communication (for example, love is expressed by words and hate or detachment by nonverbal behavior; or a child is encouraged to speak freely, but criticized or silenced whenever he or she actually does so).
- b) No metacommunication is possible; for example, asking which of the two messages is valid or describing the communication as making no sense
- c) The victim cannot leave the communication field
- d) Failing to fulfill the contradictory injunctions is punished, e.g.
And although he wished to escape from zoology because his interest in it was "purely intellectual and not heartfelt" (as he wrote his parents in 1925), his anthropological concerns were rooted in the natural biological sciences, not only as a result of his undergraduate training but from the intense informal education he got during his childhood and adolescence from his father and his father's circle.