Summary: Reading eclectically is like reading tealeaves. With both you learn something from the randomly juxtaposed constellation of leaves you throw down. These days I seem to be leafing through books on change what works and what doesn't work to motivate it. There was Barbara Ehrenreich's Brightsided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, a book after my own naturally curmudgeonly heart. It is a glorious expose' of ways in which the power of positive thinking can make us passive, oblivious, docile and dangerously myopic. Read it for a fascinating history of how the U.S., which started so dour and puritanical, became the positive thinking capital of the world. The pivot point was Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science. From Christian Science to The Secret, both with their preposterous idea that you can change anything—cure cancer or make multi-millions--if you just put your positive mind to it. Ehrenreich counsels that to bring about real change we have to analyze and identify what’s really wrong. Then there was Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath, a book after my own progressivist heart. It argues in favor of positive thinking as a way to compensate for our naturally curmudgeonly hearts. Negativity hinders. You can’t bring about change by analyzing and identifying what’s wrong. Instead, you must identify and build on successes and set passion-fueled positive yet concrete goals. Both books are quite convincing. They tease out my ambivalence about positivity and negativity—carrots and sticks--in producing change, a dilemma after my own inconsistency-probing heart. In between, I’ve been reading a 34-year-old book called Double Bind: The Foundation of the communicational approach to the family. This book is a retrospective on 20 years of research into a 1956 concept developed by Gregory Bateson, one of my mentors. Bateson hypothesized that schizophrenia might develop in children who are repeatedly subjected to inconsistent parental messages of a particular kind he called the double bind. A double bind is a double message and a bind that keeps you from saying it is a double message. It’s a three-way, no-win situation that amounts to you’re damned if you do; you’re damned if you don’t, and you’re damned also if notice that you’re damned either way. In other words, “By jerking you around, I’ll make you feel powerless and if you try to escape my jerking, I’ll make you feel even more powerless.” Bateson came to his hypothesis through case-study evidence and through an abiding fascination with the logic of paradoxes (a fascination I share). The case studies included situations like this: A young man who had fairly well recovered from an acute schizophrenic episode was visited in the hospital by his mother. He was glad to see her and impulsively put his arm around her shoulders whereupon she stiffened. He withdrew his arm and she asked, “Don’t you love me any more? He then blushed, and she said, “Dear, you must not be so easily embarrassed and afraid of your feelings.” The patient was able to stay with her only a few minutes more and following her departure he assaulted an aide and was put in the tubs. Bateson identified the double bind’s three necessary and sufficient conditions: 1. The individual is involved in an intense relationship; that is, a relationship in which he feels it is vitally important that he discriminate accurately what sort of message is being communicated so that he may respond appropriately. 2. And, the individual is caught in a situation in which the other person in the relationship is expressing two orders of message and each of these denies the other. 3. And, the individual is unable to comment on the messages being expressed to correct his discrimination of what order
