Gregory Bateson

The cybernetics of "self": a theory of alcoholism.

The present essay is based upon ideas which are, perhaps all of them, familiar either to psychiatrists who have had dealings with alcoholics, or to philosophers who have thought about the implications of cybernetics and systems theory The only novelty which can be claimed for the thesis here offered derives from treating these ideas seriously as premises of argument and from the bringing together of commonplace ideas from two too-separate fields of thought. In its first conception, this essay was planned to be a systems-theoretic study of alcoholic addiction, in which I would use data from the publications of Alcoholics Anonymous, which has the only outstanding record of success in dealing with alcoholics. It soon became evident, however, that the religious views and the organizational structure of A. A. presented points of great interest to systems theory, and that the correct scope of my study should include not only the premises of alcoholism but also the premises of the A.A. system of treating it and the premises of A. A. organization. My debt to A.A. wili be evident throughout-also, I hope, my respect for that organization and especially for the extraordinary wisdom of its co-founders, Bill W. and Dr. Bob. In addition, I have to acknowledge a debt to a small sample of alcoholic patients with whom I worked intensively for about two years in 1949-52, in the Veterans Administration Hospital, Palo Alto, California. These men, it should be mentioned, carried other diagnosesmostly of “schizophrenia”-in addition to the pains of alcoholism. Several were members of A.A. I fear that I helped them not at all.

THE ROLE OF SOMATIC CHANGE IN EVOLUTION

All theories of biological evolution depend upon at least three sorts of change: (a) change of genotype, either by mutation or by redistribution of genes; (b) somatic change under pressure of environment; and (c) changes in environmental conditions. The problem for the evolutionist is to build a theory combining these types of change into an ongoing process which, under natural selection, will account for the phenomena of adaptation and phylogeny. Certain conventional premises may be selected to govern such theory building:

Experiments in Thinking about Observed Ethnological Material

S I understand it, you have asked me for an honest, introspective-personal-account of how I think about anthropological material, and if I am to be honest and personal about my thinking, then I must be impersonal about the results of that thinking. Even if I can banish both pride and shame for half an hour, honesty will still be difficult. Let met try to build up a picture of how I think by giving you an autobiographical account of how I have acquired my kit of conceptual tools and intellectual habits. I do not mean an academic biography or a list of what subjects I have studied, but something more significant than that-a list rather of the motifs of thought in various scientific subjects which left so deep an impression on my mind that when I came to work on anthropological material I naturally used those borrowed motifs to guide my approach to this new material. I owe the greatest part of this kit of tools to my father, William Bateson, who was a geneticist. In schools and universities they do very little to give one an idea of the basic principles of scientific thinking, and what I learnt of this came in very large measure from my fathers conversation and perhaps especially from the overtones of his talk. He himself was inarticulate about phi-

Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication

A primeira versão deste artigo, publicada em 1966 pela editora da Universidade da Califórnia no capítulo 25 do livro Whales, dolphins and porpoises (editado por Kenneth S. Norris), foi republicada no célebre livro de Gregory Bateson Steps to an ecology mind, que teve sua última publicação pela Universidade de Chicago, no ano 2000. Embora haja divergência mínima entre o original e a publicação mais recente, os tradutores se baseiam na última versão para esta tradução.