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 layers (i.e., logical types) of meaning communicated via tone or body language. This meta-communication, or “communication about communication,” signals whether a person is playing, making a joke, hinting, exaggerating, etc.
A person is set on the road to a psychotic breakdown or schizophrenia if he is repeatedly exposed to double-bind commands that he cannot escape because they are given by a figure who has overwhelming sway over him. In all of the examples in Bateson’s paper, this figure is the mother.
Moreover, the mother communicates her conflicting commands at two different levels. In one example, the mother, for reasons of her own unresolved trauma, becomes cold and stiff every time her grown son shows affection toward her. She does not verbalize these emotions, but when the son responds by recoiling, she says something to the effect, “Don’t you love me anymore?” With this, she verbalizes the second prong of the double bind, which demands of the son that he show affection.
When the son becomes embarrassed, she continues: “Dear, you must not be so easily embarrassed and afraid of your feelings." The double bind is thus shown to operate at two or more communication layers.
This and other examples paint vivid and jarring profiles of patients who are viciously trapped in a relationship that tears them apart towards two opposing extremes, and at the end of each extreme, instead of love and communion, there is nothing but rejection and loneliness.
The paper emphasizes the lack of exit in such a situation. The other parent – the father – may be somehow weak, absent, or co-dependent with the mother, and so unable to intervene. Or, the mother abuses her veto-power authority to jealously and often viciously prevent any other potential mentors or positive role models from entering into the child’s life and saving him or her from the dungeon.
In the end, the patient snaps into a psychotic break, which is characterized by an outpouring of panic, anxiety, and aggression. Henceforth, any situation that reminds him of his double bind, even in some minor or unpredictable detail, might trigger a panic attack. This emotional hair-trigger is a common symptom among schizophrenics.
There is another category of schizophrenic symptoms that, in Bateson’s view, constitute the patient's derailed attempts to cope with the double bind. This would be the failure to interpret meta-communicative hints.
Schizophrenics often cannot tell if the person talking to them is serious or playful, or if they are ordering, accusing, or simply making small talk (Bateson’s example of a confounding sentence: “What would you like to do today?”).
Moreover, their logical structures become altogether jumbled. An amusing example of a schizophrenic syllogism is given:
Grass dies.
Men die.
Men are grass.
To me at least, this reads as a joke on the textbook syllogism: “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.”
The “men are grass” statement can be read as a poetic metaphor, but the schizophrenic who utters it would not be able to appreciate it as such. He uses “unlabeled metaphors,” meaning that, unable to tune in to the right level of abstraction, he may utter a metaphor when a literal statement is called for, and vice versa: he might interpret the most prosaic, literal statements as unactionable metaphors.
I’ve had limited encounters with schizophrenics, but Bateson’s descriptions ring very true. And with my limited research on the topic, I thought, like so many others since 1956, that his theory of the double bind is brilliant, rich, and exceptionally useful.
Girard’s Double Bind
René Girard was intrigued by the concept of the double bind, too. He gives it much attention in his summative work, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. He assimilates the concept into his own theory of mimetic desire, placing Bateson’s double bind as a central feature of the imitative and emulative relationship between a person and their model. He thus places it at the center of the human experience.
Girard’s idea is that people are fundamentally mimetic, which means that we learn not only our skills but also our ideals and desires from others, whom Girard calls our models. Another central idea is that mimesis is inherently conflictual: as people imitate each other, they tend to become rivals and clash. Cultural systems, all rooted in the sacrificial mechanism, are needed to manage and resolve mimetic rivalry.
A subject who experiences the draw of his model or mentor will sooner or later encounter an implicit double-bind command: “Imitate me. But don’t imitate me.” This statement should be entered into some philosophy dictionary under “Girard’s double bind.” Or “the mimetic double bind.”
The model, like all human beings, strives to partake of some higher vision, or transcendence, and to manifest it. He seeks the admiring gaze of others – what today we might call appreciation, or recognition – because in that recognition he finds the assurance that he’s good. By acting thus, he signals: “I’m great. Imitate me.” This holds for any person pursuing any old endeavor, but it becomes more explicit when the person is in a formal role of the model: a parent, teacher, celebrity, leader, or influencer. But it happens among most casual friends or even as we watch passersby on the street.
The second prong of the imitative double bind happens when the imitator comes too close to the model. The transcendence that the model advertises suddenly becomes threatened by a rival when the erstwhile admirer and student comes too close to it and threatens to either snatch it away or diminish it. The student, for his part, is disturbed to suddenly find himself cruelly rebuffed by the person for which they’ve been having the fondest feelings.
Yet, the “imitate me” command does not simply disappear and switch to “don’t imitate me.” To the student, the rebuff itself signals that what he’s been chasing after is a pearl of great value. Why else would the model suddenly protect it so aggressively? The rebuff is a double bind in itself: it says both that what the model possesses is worthy of pursuit, but that it ought not be pursued.
It is especially hard on the student because it makes the model both most admirable and most despicable. He who was once a god has now become a devil. He has now become a model-obstacle, a stumbling block (skandalon) over which the student trips over and over again. The height of his divinity reinforces the depth of his depravity.
The model is not enjoying much serenity in the whole process, either. None of us, Girard insists, have an intrinsic conviction of personal transcendence. Such convictions are always shaky, and they are always harnessed from how others perceive us. The model, being one of us, is in the business of accumulating his personal kudos, not squandering it. He is desperate for admirers, and he is not at all interested in chasing them away.
So when the model suddenly discovers an admirer who’s come very close to him, he’s flattered as much as threatened. He, too, experiences the event as a tormenting double bind. His generally shaky conviction in his own blessedness suddenly gains an unexpected boost from the admirer’s energetic emulation. The admirer’s desire becomes the model for the model’s desire.
Like the admirer, the model might struggle with a sense of betrayal: “He used to obey me so well, and now he does nothing I tell him to do!” Yet, he doesn’t want the admirer to go away, but to return to his proper, subordinate role.
The relationship goes from being stable and differentiated to the opposite. The admiration of the student and the generosity of the model turn one into envy and the other into jealousy. Then, these two related emotions become further undifferentiated and turn into reciprocal and symmetric hate. We now have rivalry, where both parties imitate and torment each other, while they both struggle to re-establish the difference by placing themselves in the position of right.
The Universality of the Double Bind
Girard writes that the double bind is more universal than what Bateson’s work gives out. He sees it as a universal feature of the human experience. All relationships come with a degree of double bind. Thus, rather than correcting Bateson (like he does Freud, for example), he extrapolates his idea beyond the fields of psychology or communication theory.
Having written in critique about the pickup artist (PUA) culture, I cannot but mention the double bind that is front and center in the romantic game. For men, it’s the signal of the coquette: “Pursue me, I’m beautiful. Don’t pursue me, I’m too beautiful for you.” For women, it’s: “If I yield to him, he’ll not value me. If I don’t yield to him, I’m of no value to him.”
The socio-economic game is ridden with the double bind, too. For example, a “working-class” person (let’s just use that term for simplicity) is bound to loyalty to his working-class upbringing. Having no capital, working-class people especially need each other, which strengthens the imperative of loyalty. However, the only way to prove his loyalty is through behaviors that consolidate his working-class status, which are self-destructive behaviors. I’m talking about substance abuse, violence, delinquency, rejection of education, etc. On the other hand, if he acts disloyal, he is liable to be cast out from the social group as a traitor, a shameful and terrifying prospect.
In the words of John Lennon: “They hate you if you’re clever, and they despise a fool.”
As for family relations, they don’t have to become pathological for the double bind to arise. It is there by default. Any child comes up against it when he comes into conflict with his or her parents and has to balance the urge to speak his truth against the admonition to “honor thy father and thy mother.” Even responsible parents, for their part, often struggle with the double bind between disciplining their kids and spoiling them.
Girard writes how families having black sheep is a mild form of scapegoating mechanism. One troublemaker who everyone agrees is the destabilizing element helps the rest of the family forget about their double binds and come together.
Any form of loyalty involves a double bind, really, whether it’s to a nation, an employer, or some kind of gang. Stick out, and you expose yourself to the wrath of the mob; blend in, and you melt away.
Whatever you pursue, your models both want you to admire them, and don’t want you to admire them too much. Rich people want you to admire their riches, but not take them. Teachers want you to learn from them, but not become smarter than them. Friends want you to admire their achievements, not excel them. Parents want you to be like them, but you will always be their child. And so on.
Taken to a certain extreme, all relationships become pathological. It takes “emotional intelligence” to take one’s desires with a grain of salt, and to do nothing in excess.
You know how some people say that kids should learn this or that very important thing in school, instead of linear algebra? For some, it’s how money works; to others, it’s all the things the government does to you, or how to negotiate, or how to navigate romantic relationships.
Girard is on record submitting his own proposal in this debate: the education system should teach students about the mimetic double bind. It shouldn’t teach it (only) as a formal theory but as a piece of wisdom baked into any kind of apprenticeship. The double bind is a cornerstone of emotional intelligence.
Why is our educational system and culture blind to the mimetic double bind? To answer the question, I’m once again forced to go back to my theoretical fundamentals. In our times, there is a reigning dogma that our desires are authentic, so essentially non-conflictual. Cultural systems that stem desires are oppressive. Since the mimetic double bind reveals the dangerous instability underneath desire, it threatens the ruling dogma. And since this dogma originates in formal academia, nowhere is the double bind ignored more than there.
As a corollary, it may be that in pre-modern times, when desires were held in greater suspicion, and the stability of social positions was obsessed over, awareness of the mimetic double bind may have been greater, and its role in education or apprenticeship more present.
It should be clear that the best students are the ones most likely to crash into a mimetic double bind. These are the students who come fastest and closest to rivaling their teachers. Yet, today, these very students are most indoctrinated with the idea of authentic desires. Consequently, we live in a world full of distressed, autistic, and schizoid overachievers.
This whole thing about mimesis and education reminds me of a well-known traditional Chinese tale about the cat and the tiger.
The tiger hears that the cat is a skillful hunter and comes to the cat with presents, asking the cat to teach him. The cat takes the tiger under his wing and teaches him many skills. Over time, the tiger becomes masterful but also envious of his teacher and decides to eat him. However, the wise cat did not teach the tiger one skill: how to climb trees. So when the tiger attacks, the cat runs up on a tree and saves his life.
Mimetic Theory of Schizophrenia
In the final part of this essay, I want to return to the topic of schizophrenia and explain Girard’s ideas on it. He writes about it with his psychiatrist co-authors in the same book I mentioned above, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World.
Girard does not deny the significance of the double bind in schizophrenia, but he puts emphasis on the mimetic relationship that gives rise to it. Girard is a relationships guy: to him, “the other” is always a hidden specter haunting our psyche. Bateson, on the other hand, regresses towards the scientistic bias of our era in his attempt to define the double bind as a systems problem, analogous to problems in “cybernetics” and centered around the subject’s problems with language processing. The patient is modeled rather as a communications device.
Rather than the double bind, Girard prefers to talk about the double as the central symptom of schizophrenia. The double is, on the one hand, the model-obstacle taken to such a pitch of rivalry that the difference between him and the subject – the difference between the student and the model – disappears, and the two persons appear indistinguishable in the subject’s mind.
On the other hand, the double is the haunting apparition that is the source of the quintessential schizophrenic symptoms: the source of auditory hallucinations or “voices,” which are invariably adversarial and negative, or the preternaturally powerful and malevolent entity that cripples the patient with paranoia.
The biggest blind spot of Bateson’s double bind analysis, in my view, is that he does not address paranoia and the sense of being haunted by invisible entities, connected symptoms that constitute the central feature of schizophrenia, both in the mind of the patient and as observed by sane people around him. The other symptoms – scrambled communication, panic attacks, anhedonia – are secondary responses and mechanisms for coping with the torment of being possessed by the double.
The term “schizophrenia” means the splitting or fission of the mind. Bateson and Girard both see a splitting at the heart of the condition. To Bateson, the mind is torn apart between two contradicting commands. In contrast, to Girard, there is, on top of that, the splitting of personality into the suffering patient and his “hallucinatory” tormenting double who has invaded the most intimate depths of his psyche.
To explain the genesis of the schizophrenic double, we must start with the model who created the double bind. Whether it’s an overbearing mother or a model of some worldly success — career, academic, romantic — the message always boils down to the basic “imitate me; don’t imitate me,” or “do as I say: don’t do as I say.” By presenting such a formidable challenge, the model presents themselves as a formidable being — one existing on transcendental heights that can be reached only after heroic effort.
The entrapped subject cannot perceive the impossibility of the task; rather, he may experience it as a great and therefore noble challenge. The strength of the obstacle indicates the value of the prize. Thus, the subject becomes imbued with “prodigious metaphysical ambition,” in Girard’s words — his is a Quixotic mission above the din of ordinary life.
A person struggling in the milder phases of the double bind exhibits neuroticism. People around him might say he carries the weight of the world on his shoulders and seems preoccupied with some deep questions. His torment with the double bind is easy to conflate with depth of thought. Yet, perhaps there is nothing to conflate — dealing with impossible mothers and other models does tend to promote profound thought.
Here, we can shed some light on the saying that the line between a genius and a madman is thin. Both of these guys have that prodigious metaphysical ambition, and I’d venture to say that a lot of genius also originates in some double bind. The difference between the genius and the madman is that the genius finds some brilliant resolution to his conundrum – what Girard would call a “sacrificial” resolution, and what we might observe as some prodigious outburst of creativity.
Perhaps we can add a third alternative to resolving the double bind, distinct from both genius and madman: this would be what they call “growing up” or “maturing.” It implies not caring so much, resigning to the world being an imperfect place (“loss of innocence”), and moving on to some other models and obstacles and starting afresh.
Growing up is also a sacrificial resolution because it inevitably involves blaming the crisis on someone or something, be it oneself, the model, or a third person, or explaining the whole mess away with some mystifying psychological concept (e.g., the Oedipus complex, autism spectrum disorder, genetic predisposition) or political issue (“f**k Trump!”). Ultimately, what differentiates the grownup from the genius and the madman is simply that he exits the charmed circle earlier, while he’s still relatively chill, while the latter two continue in it to the point where it drives their mind to a fever pitch. Overwrought sensibilities are the one thing that all sorts of geniuses and all sorts of madmen have in common.
But, unlike the genius, at the height of this emotional fever, the madman collapses into unreason under the crushing weight of his tormenting model.
Girard and his interlocutors in Things Hidden mention schizophrenia in some places, but in others, they talk about madness or mental illness in general. To them, any mental breakdown, if not caused by some obvious chemical or traumatic factor, stems from the inability to escape the double-bind between the subject and the model-turned-rival, and the consequent undifferentiation between the two to the point where the model becomes the haunting double of the subject.
Everything termed obsession has a personified model-obstacle that it obsesses over. Bipolar disorder is a stage before schizophrenia, where the subject and the model haven’t quite yet become doubles, but their relative positions fluctuate in the mind of the subject. In the depressive stage, the model is experienced as victorious in his oppression; in the manic stage, the subject temporarily gains the upper hand and experiences life as an ecstasy of total victory.
Even homosexuality, which until very recently was classified as a mental illness, is suggested in Things Hidden as arising from the obsession with the model-obstacle – the subject becomes obsessed with his romantic rival to the point where he turns his sexual appetite from the contested object to the rival himself. Girard even mentions archaic cannibalism as the homosexual analog involving the contest for food rather than sex.
When the obsession aggravates into the catastrophic collapse of schizophrenia, the model-obstacle has become a spiritual entity with demonic powers. He can blithely transgress the most intimate and sacred boundary between the self and the outside world. He can read the subject's mind and, not only control him with irresistible suggestions, but even take wholesale possession of his body to commit shocking acts of violence or self-harm.
The schizophrenic lives in constant terror of this powerful entity, and he often goes on the run in a vain attempt to hide from it or escape it, abandoning his home and living homeless behind a dumpster. When asked to articulate what he is afraid of, the schizophrenic will struggle to find words, but when he does give an explanation, it invariably sounds like an esoteric conspiracy theory.
I’m quite sure that such conspiracy theorizing must be highly correlated to a higher risk of schizophrenia. I’ve written and insisted that conspiracy theorizing of the esoteric kind, a growing cultural phenomenon, can be described as a mild form of schizophrenia. And I wrote that both conspiracy theorizing and schizophrenia are analog to demonic possession of archaic rituals.
In Things Hidden, the authors round off their discussion of mental illness by talking about how modern psychiatry collaborates with the patient in reinforcing it. The patient who’s haunted by a double is above all desperate to establish a difference or a boundary between it and himself. It was his unrelenting obsession with this difference that, paradoxically, produced the double in the first place.
In the cataclysmic battle with his double, the patient ended up absorbing from him and sharing with him all the highest and lowest visions of the universe. When the patient insists on the fantastical powers or depravities of his double, he is indeed revealing his own unshakable convictions.
After a psychotic breakdown, the patient has reached a point where the difference between him and his model has completely vanished, due to his unhinged obsession over the model, but to retain a basic level of functioning, he needs an assurance of some difference. The psychiatrist provides him with that difference by declaring that the double is not real – it’s a mere hallucination – while the patient himself is, of course, a real person, but ill. The diagnosis of hallucination covers up the mimetic origin of the double, an origin that the patient cannot countenance because it implies that he has become identical to the one thing he loathes and fears above all else. Yet, in some sense, the double is real; the difference is illusory.
The psychiatrist cannot bend so far from “consensus reality” as to agree with and validate the patient’s conspiratorial takes on lizard people and such. But he can meet him halfway with a medical diagnosis that makes both the patient and the sane people around him minimally satisfied. To make the whole arrangement more convincing, he will select a diagnosis, or a bouquet of them, among a collection of colorful and fascinating classes of irreducible mental disorders.
The patient will not have it any other way. His battle against the double took an unfortunate turn, but at least the status of being mad gives him a minimum level of assurance that he is at least somehow real, different, and special.
The whole process of psychiatric diagnosis is akin to the archaic process of mythologizing a social crisis. What caused it was violent mimetic conflict, but what’s said by the shamans to have caused it are one or more gods or demons from an established pantheon.
I know that this last point on psychiatry as enabling mental illness is far-fetched. It is speculative, for sure, but I decided to include it as a sharp jab at the psychiatric establishment. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but I share the growing mistrust in the medical-pharmaceutical complex. Events of recent years, not least the Covid pandemic, have revealed acts of flagrant malpractice. The medical elites mythologize diseases to create a belief system that yields them the most profits.
We need a return to rational medicine. Or, we have yet to travel forward to reach it for the first time.
