Schizophrenia

[Dekalb_Blues]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind
http://echorecovery.blogspot.com/2014/01...on_12.html

In 1969 in a symposium on schizophrenia and the double bind at the National Institute of Mental Health, the cybernetician and ethnographer Gregory Bateson stood before an audience of some of the most prominent psychiatrists and psychologists in the world and proceeded to discuss the mental life of animals. This was not a question of expertise; Bateson was known as the inventor of the term “double bind” and a pioneer in creating models to treat addiction and wartime trauma, but he did not wish to discuss those cases. Rather, he invoked, by example, a porpoise.
This porpoise had been trained at a Navy research facility to perform tricks and other trained acts in return for fish. One day, her trainers started a new regimen. They deprived her of food unless she produced a new trick. Starved if she repeated the same act, but also if she did not perform, the porpoise was trapped. This experiment was repeated with numerous porpoises, usually culminating in extreme aggression, and a descent into what from an anthropomorphic perspective might be labeled disaffection, confusion, antisocial, and violent behavior. Bateson with his usual lack of reservation was ready to label these dolphins as suffering the paranoid form of schizophrenia. The anthropologist was at pains to remind his audience that, however, before rushing to conclusions about genetic predeterminacy or innate typologies, the good doctors should recall that these psychotic porpoises were acting very reasonably and rationally. In fact, they were doing exactly what their training as animals in a navy laboratory would lead them to do. Their problem was that they had two conflicting signals. They had been taught to obey and be rewarded. But now obedience bought punishment and so did disobedience. The poor animals, having no perspective on their situation as laboratory experiments were naturally breaking apart—fissuring their personalities (and Bateson thought they had them) in efforts to be both rebellious and compliant, but above all to act as they had been taught. The motto of the story being that to act rationally in a set pattern following given rules might also be to act psychotically.
This one porpoise, however, appeared to possess a good memory. She was capable of other things. Bateson related how, between the fourteenth and fifteenth demonstration, the porpoise “appeared much excited,” and for her final performance she gave an “elaborate” display, including multiple pieces of behavior of which four were “entirely new—never before observed in this species of animal.” These were not solely genetically endowed abilities; they were learned, the result of an experiment in time. This process in which the subject—whether a patient or a dolphin—uses the memories of other interactions and other situations to transform his or her actions within the immediate scenario can become the very seat of innovation. The dolphin’s ego (in so far as we decide she has one) was sufficiently weakened to be reformed, developing new attachments to objects in its environment and to memories in its past. This rewired network of relations can lead to emergence through the recontextualization of the situation within which the confused and conflicted animal finds itself:

                This story [of the porpoise and its trainer] illustrates, I believe, two aspects of the genesis of a transcontextual syndrome:
            First, that severe pain and maladjustment can be induced by putting a mammal in the wrong regarding its rules of making
            sense of an important relationship with another mammal. And second, that if this pathology can be warded off or resisted,
            the total experience may promote creativity.

Schizophrenia, therefore, can be the very seat of creativity: a not unproblematic assumption. But one that nonetheless tied older histories of pathology, madness, and genius, to the new theories of communication, which for Bateson also included our minds.

-- From "Schizophrenic Techniques: Cybernetics, the Human Sciences, and the Double Bind" by Orit Halpern http://sfonline.barnard.edu/feminist-med...le-bind/0/