The Double Bind and Schizophrenia
Questions on Girard #5
My attempt to keep the weekly posts at around 1000 words is not working out so far. I apologize and will try to come down toward that word count in the future. But can’t quite promise yet.
Gregory Bateson and his colleagues wrote a seminal paper in 1956 in which they coined the term “double bind.” The paper, titled “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia,” proposed that the double bind is the primary cause of that mental disorder.
The double bind has since entered common parlance to describe a situation in which a person experiences two conflicting commands that both lead to failure. He is “damned if he does, and damned if he don’t.” This is also known as “catch-22.”
Bateson’s paper is in the dry academic style. It begins with an attempt at a rigorous technical definition of the double bind, borrowing concepts from Bertrand Russel’s Theory of Logical Types. It applies these logical types to language, explaining how verbal communication has different layer…