Gregory Bateson

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

Born in Grantchester, Cambridgeshire, on 9 May 1904, he was the youngest of three sons of Beatrice Durham and the geneticist William Bateson. He was named after Gregor Mendel. After his brothers died—John in World War I and Martin by suicide in 1922—his parents’ ambitions shifted to him. He attended Charterhouse School, earned a biology degree from St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1925, and continued there until 1929.

In 1928, he lectured in linguistics at the University of Sydney. From 1931 to 1937, he was a fellow at St. John’s College, and before World War II, he did anthropological fieldwork in New Guinea and Bali. During the war, he served in the OSS, designing black propaganda radio broadcasts and working on covert operations in Burma, Thailand, China, India, and Ceylon. He applied his theory of schismogenesis to create discord among enemies. After the war, he helped extend systems theory and cybernetics to the social and behavioral sciences. In Palo Alto, he developed the double-bind theory with Donald Jackson, Jay Haley, and John Weakland as part of 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 later the Group Processes conferences (1954–1960), representing social and behavioral sciences. In the 1970s, he taught at the Humanistic Psychology Institute (later Saybrook University) and joined the faculty of Kresge College at UC Santa Cruz in 1972. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1976. Governor Jerry Brown appointed him to the University of California Board of Regents, a role 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 systems theories.

He married Margaret Mead in 1936; they had a daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson (1939–2021), and divorced in 1950. He married Elizabeth Sumner in 1951; they had a son, John Sumner Bateson (1951–2015), and twins who died shortly after birth, divorcing in 1957. In 1961, he married Lois Cammack; they had a daughter, Nora Bateson (born 1968). He was a lifelong atheist and a member of the Lindisfarne Association. He died on 4 July 1980 at the San Francisco Zen Center. The 2014 novel *Euphoria* by Lily King fictionalizes his relationships with Mead and Reo Fortune in pre-war New Guinea.

Bateson saw simple relationships where others saw inexplicable details. In “From Versailles to Cybernetics,” he argued that twentieth-century history reflects a malfunctioning relationship, with the Treaty of Versailles exemplifying patterns of betrayal and hate.