Gregory Bateson

Gregory Bateson (9 May 1904 – 4 July 1980) was an English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist whose work touched many other fields. He is best known for creating the double-bind theory of schizophrenia and for his work in systems theory and cybernetics. His books include *Steps to an Ecology of Mind* (1972) and *Mind and Nature* (1979).

Bateson was born in Grantchester, Cambridgeshire, England, the youngest of three sons. His father, William Bateson, was a noted geneticist, and his mother was Caroline Beatrice Durham. He was named after Gregor Mendel. After attending Charterhouse School from 1917 to 1921, he earned a Bachelor of Arts in biology from St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1925, and continued his studies there until 1929. His life was deeply affected by the deaths of his two older brothers: John was killed in World War I, and Martin died by suicide in 1922 after conflict with their father over his wish to be a poet. The family’s expectations then fell on Gregory.

In 1928, he taught linguistics at the University of Sydney. From 1931 to 1937, he was a Fellow at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and spent the years before World War II doing anthropological fieldwork in New Guinea and Bali. During the 1940s, he helped apply systems theory and cybernetics to the social and behavioral sciences. Though initially reluctant, he served in the OSS during the war, working alongside Julia Child and others. He designed black propaganda radio broadcasts, was deployed on covert missions in Burma and Thailand, and worked in China, India, and Ceylon. He used his theory of schismogenesis to create discord among enemy forces. The war upset him, and he disagreed with his wife about whether science should be used for social planning or only for understanding.

In Palo Alto, California, Bateson developed the double-bind theory with Donald Jackson, Jay Haley, and John H. Weakland, in what became known as the Bateson Project (1953–1963). He became a U.S. citizen in 1956. He was a core member of the Macy conferences on cybernetics (1941–1960) and the later Group Processes meetings (1954–1960), representing the social and behavioral sciences. In the 1970s, he taught at the Humanistic Psychology Institute in San Francisco (later renamed Saybrook University) and joined the faculty of Kresge College at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1972. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1976. California Governor Jerry Brown appointed him to the University of California Board of Regents, a position he held until his death, though he resigned from the Special Research Projects committee in 1979 over the university’s nuclear weapons work. In his final decade, he worked on a “meta-science” of epistemology to unify early forms of systems theory from different fields.

Bateson was married three times. His first wife, from 1936 to 1950, was anthropologist Margaret Mead; they had a daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson (1939–2021), who also became an anthropologist. They separated in 1947 and divorced in 1950. In 1951, he married Elizabeth “Betty” Sumner, daughter of an Episcopalian bishop; they had a son, John Sumner Bateson (1951–2015), and twins who died shortly after birth in 1953. They divorced in 1957. In 1961, he married therapist and social worker Lois Cammack; they had a daughter, Nora Bateson (born 1968). Bateson was a lifelong atheist and a member of the Lindisfarne Association. He died on July 4, 1980, at age 76, in the guest house of the San Francisco Zen Center. The 2014 novel *Euphoria* by Lily King fictionalizes his relationships with Mead and Reo Fortune in pre-WWII New Guinea.

Bateson saw simple relationships where others saw inexplicable details. In “From Versailles to Cybernetics,” he argued that twentieth-century history could be seen as a history of malfunctioning relationships, with the Treaty of Versailles exemplifying a pattern based on betrayal and hate.