Bateson, Epistemological Inheritance and Critical Pedagogy

Leonie White
Jun 26
9 min read

TL;DR: This article draws on Vygotski’s pedagogy to invite the reader to approach difficult theorists in a relational way which maps proximal knowledges onto existing experiences. Using Bateson as an example, we explore similar orientations in life experiences between the theorist and the reader as a foundation for learning in a critical pedagogy framework.

The reflections here are drawn from my formative years and early clinical work. Growing up, I was fortunate enough to participate in the domains of field research and entomological sciences. I believe this served to naturalise me to systems thinking from the time I was very small, similarly to Bateson’s household. These reflections may simultaneously offer a bridge and satisfying reason as to why his writings are difficult for those coming from the internalising disciplines, or who feel they must shun non-privileged ways of knowing in therapeutic practice.

It is my hope that in reading this article you feel invited to experience the stories you tell of your life as a foundation to the way that you practice therapy. I would also be delighted to hear from you about anything that you find here.

Bateson as an Exercise in Frustrating Systemic Trainees?

Bateson’s thinking is so fundamental to systemic psychotherapy that exposure to his ideas remain a virtual rite of passage for Trainees. The prevailing experience of this exposure seems to be:

● I can identify his disparate ideas (Communication, Doubles Binds, Feedback Loops, Recursive Processes)

● What exactly is he trying to say?

● What am I meant to do with this, anyway?

If you find yourself here, don’t worry, it’s normal. Ordinarily you’ll be offered another source who has rendered his language more accessible. If you want to pursue that pathway, I recommend Lynn Hoffman’s Foundations and Family Therapy (1981). I believe there is also real value to reading primary sources and making whatever meaning of them we can. It is my experience that continuing to persevere with Bateson offers a particularly useful way of seeing human suffering, and the world more broadly. His thinking has profoundly informed my assessment and formulation of clinical presentations. Perhaps more significantly, I have found that when his ideas are taken in their totality and followed to their conclusion, they offer a comprehensive framework for understanding and responding to psychotic experience. Some of my most meaningful work with young people experiencing psychosis has emerged from this orientation. While a detailed discussion of psychosis and its treatment sits beyond the scope of this article, it is worth noting that my investment in Bateson is not merely intellectual. It is grounded in the practical difference his ideas have made in the lives of people I have worked alongside. In Bateson’s treatment, psychotic experience is neither defective biology nor pathological psychology, it is instead located inside of broader adaptive and non-obvious communication, relational and identity related processes.

One of the difficulties of reading Bateson is pedagogical. Vygotsky's work on learning offers a useful way of understanding why. Vygotsky suggested that learning takes place in the space between what a person already knows and what it is possible for them to know. New understandings become available through relationships which connect unfamiliar ideas to familiar experiences. From this perspective, knowledge is not transmitted from one person to another so much as it is built through participation in conversations, practices and ways of life.

Gregory Bateson’s life experiences and orientations were a bit alien to many of his contemporaries. You were likely trained to flatten psychotherapeutic thought as a homogenous discipline, whose conclusions are arrived at through a mixture of introspection and statistical abstraction. Bateson didn’t come from the internalising and introspective psychoanalytic traditions popular at the time. William Bateson, his father, was a renowned geneticist and peer of Charles Darwin. The Bateson’s even sent Gregory to the Galapagos in an effort to recreate Darwin’s fieldwork in 1925. That expedition ultimately evolved into the anthropological field works in New Guinea that produced the systemic underpinnings of his thought, present in Naven. From childhood, Bateson was taught to observe things in interaction with each other, and to infer adaptive and competitive processes.

This is a place where I can relate to Bateson. I have increasingly come to think that understanding a theorist is not simply a matter of comprehending their ideas. It is also a matter of finding points of connection with the experiences that made those ideas possible. When we discover common ground with a person's history, concerns or habits of observation, we enter into a different kind of relationship with their thinking. Their concepts cease to appear as abstract propositions and begin to make sense as responses to the world they inhabited.

My father was an entomologist and my childhood and adolescence was blessed with continuous participation in his fieldwork, his collaboration with peers, taxonomy, conservation efforts and publication. I’d like to share one brief example of this connection in the hopes of evoking a similar story for you, in your connection with the therapists whose thinking you cherish, or, are attempting to connect with.

I learned that the explanations of the things which make up our world resided not within those things themselves, but within the exploration of the relationships between them. I may have been emptying a beetle trap searching for specimens to build a series for naming a new species when I would come across a fly which was mimicking a local wasp. In ecological function, that fly might have served as waste management and an additional pollinator to flowers the wasp was specialised onto. The fly gained protection through its mimicry, and allowed the ecology to independently vary the number and proportion of pollinators and parasitoids. Those parasitic wasps being necessary in the correct proportion to balance populations of caterpillars so as not to strip their specialised food sources. Those caterpillars having gained protection from other predation by specialising onto toxic foodplants and accumulating those toxins. On and on and on the relationships would go, and none of these creatures would make any sense on their own. All having carefully negotiated these relationships over the eons, and, possibly in an ontological sense, that field where the negotiation occurs being as real as the things offered directly to our observation.

Psychopathology as Relational, rather than Disordered

Bateson repeatedly invites us to shift our attention from things to relationships and to how things are connected.

This shift appears deceptively simple. We are often taught to locate our minds inside the skull, our meaning inside our words, our behaviour inside people and pathology inside our individuals. Bateson didn’t accept these truths as self-evident. He argued that what we call mind, meaning, behaviour and pathology emerge through patterns of relationship rather than existing as properties of isolated entities.

From this perspective, information is not a thing that exists independently in the world. A raised eyebrow only becomes meaningful within a particular relationship and context. Silence may communicate care, hostility, grief or respect depending on the history and circumstances in which it occurs. Meaning is not found in the gesture itself, but in the network of relationships and ideas through which it is offered, interpreted and returned.

The same can be said of behaviour. Systemic therapists rarely need convincing that a child's behaviour cannot be understood apart from their family, school, peer group or broader social world. In this sense, therapists are already familiar with Bateson's concern for context, feedback and recursive communication. The challenge of reading Bateson is often not learning new ideas, but learning to notice how thoroughly relational our explanations can become when we follow them to their conclusion, instead of stopping where we’re told to.

Barrier to Entry

I have come to wonder whether the difficulty many therapists experience with Bateson is not primarily intellectual, but epistemological. Most clinicians are trained within traditions that locate suffering within persons. Even when we reject simplistic biological reductionism, we often continue to search for explanations within individuals: beliefs, emotions, cognitions, attachment styles, personality traits or diagnoses. The individual remains the primary unit of analysis.

Bateson asks a much more radical question: what if the unit of analysis is wrong?

This is not to suggest that people do not think, feel or suffer. Instead, Bateson invites us to consider whether these experiences can ever be adequately understood in isolation from the relational systems in which they occur. From this perspective, a problem is not necessarily located within a person any more than an ecosystem can be understood by examining a single organism removed from its environment.

The challenge, then, is not simply learning new concepts. It is learning to stand in the same place, notice what is going on between things and ask different questions. Instead of asking what is wrong with this person, Bateson repeatedly directs our attention towards the relationships, distinctions, contexts and patterns of interaction that render particular forms of behaviour, meaning and experience possible and comprehensible. This requires a shift on our part in ways of knowing toward attending to curiosity.

Finding Your Own Bridge

Vygotsky proposed that learning occurs through relationships which connect what is already known to what is not yet known. From this perspective, understanding Bateson may be less a matter of reading more and more a matter of finding an appropriate bridge.

Entomology happened to be one such bridge for me. Through it, I learned to attend to patterns, relationships, contexts and non-obvious consequences long before I encountered those ideas in systemic literature. Other readers are likely to find their bridges elsewhere. Music, parenting, teaching, team sports, farming, military service, community organising and countless other experiences can cultivate similar sensitivities to relationship and process.

This invites a different question for early career therapists. Rather than asking only, "How do I understand Bateson?", it may be equally useful to ask, "What in my life has already taught me to see what is going on between things?"

● What communities have shaped the way I think and see?

● What experiences have taught me to notice abstract outcomes in relational processes?

● Where did I first learn about feedback and self-regulating systems?

● When did I discover that actions often produce non-obvious consequences?

● What events taught me to attend to context rather than isolated happenings?

Therapists do not encounter theory as blank slates. We participate in theory through the lives we have already lived. Perhaps the challenge of reading Bateson is not simply acquiring new knowledge, but recognising forms of knowledge that have been present in our lives all along.

Our Inheritance

Bateson remains important not only because he provides a frame through which to view contemporary clinical problems, but because he directs our attention towards the assumptions from which our modern answers emerge. In a profession increasingly organised around interventions, protocols and treatment models, his work invites us to return to more fundamental questions.

● What is a mind?

● What is a relationship?

● What is information?

● Where does suffering reside?

● What should be considered the appropriate unit of analysis?

These are not merely philosophical curiosities. They are the questions that shape everything which follows. The most enduring thinkers are often remembered not because they discovered the final answers to important questions, but because they discovered questions which remained worth asking. To remain in conversation with thinkers like Bateson is, in part, to remain capable of asking first-order questions about the foundations of our practice. The value of remaining in such conversations does not lie in accepting their conclusions uncritically, but in inheriting the vision and resultant questions which they persisted with. If our epistemological inheritance is concerned with anything, perhaps it is concerned with this: not merely receiving answers from those who came before us, or who are now espousing ways of practice, but learning how to participate in the inquiries that animated their lives, and, which could come to animate our own.

Conclusion

Bateson is one of many difficult to read theorists who have deeply shaped systemic practice. He often appears difficult because he is not merely offering new concepts. Bateson is inviting readers into a different way of seeing the world through relationships. Vygotsky reminds us that entry into new forms of knowing occurs through relationships which map knowledge onto what is already familiar. As there are many such theorists I believe this relational approach is broadly applicable to difficult to read thinkers. One of my own bridges to this place was built through childhood experiences in entomology and field science.Yours will almost certainly be different, as will be the places you find yourself and are going to. The task is not to abandon your history in pursuit of theory, but to discover what it is that your history makes possible as you connect to that which you are coming to know. In a sense, learning here is less about receiving a recorded body of knowledge, and more about connecting our minds across the world and through time, by the resonant elements between our stories.

Preston Mayo

Accredited Mental Health Social Worker (AMHSW)

BSocSc(Psych), MSW(Q)

prestonmayo.com

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