2022-02-21

February 21 (the third Monday of the month, dodging Valentine's Day, to run into Family Day!) is the 97th meeting for Systems Thinking Ontario. The registration is at https://double-binds.eventbrite.ca .

Schizophrenia, Alcoholism, Double Binds:  From Practice to System Theory

Is there a pattern where you see a system is stuck?  In the 1960s-1970s, anthropologist Gregory Bateson was working with cases of schizophrenia and alcoholism, leading to the development of systems theories on double-binds.

In the Bateson (1971) article, a systems theory was built to explain why the 12 step program from Alcoholics Anonymous seemed to work.

> Bill W., the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, himself an alcoholic, cut through all this mythology of conflict in the very first of the famous "Twelve Steps" of A.A.  [....]

> In sum, I shall argue that the "sobriety" of the alcoholic is characterized by an unusually disastrous variant of the Cartesian dualism, the division be- tween Mind and Matter, or, in this case, between conscious will, or "self," and the remainder of the personality. Bill W.'s stroke of genius was to break up with the first "step" the structuring of this dualism.

> Philosophically viewed, this first step is not a surrender; it is simply a change in epistemology, a change in how to know about the personality-in- the-world. And, notably, the change is from an incorrect to a more correct epistemology. [Bateson 1971, p. 3]

For those who are areligious, AA Agnostica provides "A Collection of Alternative 12 Steps".  Nearby to us, there is an AA Toronto Agnostics group.

This session will review the history of development of ideas that have now become canon in personal and group development.

Our guide will be Gary Metcalf, a former president of the International Federation for Systems Research and the International Society for the Systems Sciences.  Gary came to systems theory after a prior career in family therapy.

Venue:

• The link for a Zoom conference will be sent upon preregistration.

• Unfortunately, due to the pandemic OCADU, sLab (Strategic Innovation Lab), 205 Richmond Street West, Room 410 is not available!

Suggested pre-reading: 

Pre-reading TBD

• Visser, Max. 2003. “Gregory Bateson on Deutero-Learning and Double Bind: A Brief Conceptual History.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 39 (3): 269–78. https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.10112. Alternate search on Google Scholar.

• Bateson, Gregory. 1960. “Minimal Requirements for a Theory of Schizophrenia.” AMA Archives of General Psychiatry 2 (5): 477–91. https://doi.org/10.1001/archpsyc.1960.03590110001001.  Alternate search on Google Scholar.

  • Also republished in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, alternate search on Google Scholar.

• Bateson, Gregory. 1971. “The Cybernetics of ‘Self’: A Theory of Alcoholism.” Psychiatry 34 (1): 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/00332747.1971.11023653. Alternate search on Google Scholar.

  • Also republished in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, alternate search on Google Scholar.

• Bateson, Gregory. 1972. “The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication.” In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1987 reprint, 279–308. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Alternate search on Google Scholar.

Agenda

Post-meeting artifacts

Bloggers are encouraged to write about their learning and experiences at the meeting. Links will be added to this page.