Gregory Bateson and Humanistic Psychology

Abstract

I have long been fascinated by the thinking of Gregory Bateson. I sense in his ideas important directions for modem culture and especially pointer readings for the theory we so clearly need as a foundation for humanistic psychology. In this article I discuss Bateson's epistemology, which I find as a kind of Berkeleyan idealism in which ideas have consequences and therefore are important aspects of reality. For some ideas “validity depends upon belief.” Bateson is not a believer in American individualism; he loves such terms as form, order, and pattern. His learning theory rests centrally on the changing of contexts rather than the mere acquisition of data. He believes it is an error to bootleg into psychology words that come from engineering and physics, like “energy” or “stress” or “input” or “feedback.” He would use only human words for human beings, like form, (in-form), order. These are all words that have to do with human relationships. He criticizes us humanists for being “so materialistic” (i.e., we take over the division of reality into the material and spiritual world). In this sense we ape the behaviorists. Unfortunately, so long as we use their concept of the world, we will be fighting a losing battle. Bateson believes in both deductive and inductive science: the inductive is the acquisition of data, but our very way of perceiving data comes from deductive views of life, even though this is denied by many empiricists. Bateson is for uniting these two so that our data will then be “based on the historical fundamentals of science and philosophy.” His thoughts can be summarized in the well-known pensée from Pascal. “The heart has reasons that the reason knows not of”. © 1976, Sage Publications. All rights reserved.