Bateson and Palo Alto: Metaphor in Context — Part 1 of 8
Imagine two colleagues discussing a difficult project. One says, “We are going round in circles.” The other draws a loop in the air, then places a finger beside it: “Where would we have to step out?” The metaphor has become something they can examine together. Yet the same first sentence, delivered after a disagreement, could sound like an accusation. Its significance depends on what the participants are doing with it.
This invented example introduces a central concern in Gregory Bateson’s work: how communication acquires meaning within relationships and contexts. His writing offers a distinctive approach to metaphor because it asks about the organisation of an exchange, as well as the resemblance between the things being compared. The image matters, but so do the circumstances in which it appears and the response it invites.
A wider question about meaning
Bateson’s interests ranged across anthropology, animal communication, learning, psychiatry, biology and art. That range can make his writing difficult to place. He was not developing one narrow theory of figurative sentences. In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, questions about play, performance, learning and communication repeatedly intersect. A reader interested in metaphor therefore needs to look beyond essays with “metaphor” in their titles. [1]
For Bateson, a signal cannot always be understood by examining its physical form alone. A movement might belong to a fight, a rehearsal or a game. The observer needs information about the relationship between the participants and about the kind of activity taking place. This is why his work gives such prominence to context: it helps establish what a communication counts as. [2]
That approach changes a familiar question. Alongside asking what a metaphor represents, we can ask what the metaphor is accomplishing here. Is it inviting a shared comparison? Making a criticism less direct? Offering a description that the speaker finds difficult to state otherwise? These are possible enquiries, not a checklist of hidden meanings. The answers depend on the particular exchange.
Messages about messages
In A Theory of Play and Fantasy, Bateson distinguishes communication about language from communication about the relationship between speakers. The latter is central to what he calls metacommunication. Such information need not be delivered as an explicit announcement. Tone, timing, movement and an established relationship may help people recognise an exchange as playful, hostile or exploratory. [2]
The distinction is useful when considering metaphor. Suppose someone says, “You are a machine.” At a sports practice, this might express admiration for endurance. In a conversation about bereavement, it could criticise an apparent absence of feeling. In a workshop on fictional characters, it might be an instruction to act. The words alone leave these possibilities unresolved. These examples illustrate the problem; they are not experimental findings.
Nor is a speaker’s intention the whole story. An affectionate comparison can be received as belittling. A supposedly harmless joke can make further discussion harder. The next response may reveal agreement, discomfort, puzzlement or a different understanding. Attending to that response gives an interpreter evidence that an isolated sentence cannot provide.
Metaphor beyond spoken language
Bateson’s metalogue Why a Swan? considers a dancer performing a swan. The dancer’s body remains human, while the performance brings another form of life into view. The discussion explores what is involved in this combination without reducing it to a zoological mistake. A metaphorical relationship can be enacted through movement, costume and performance, rather than expressed as a verbal formula. [3]
This makes room for a broader understanding of metaphor in everyday life. Someone can enact being weighed down, draw an uncertain boundary or position two objects to show a relationship. Whether a particular action is metaphorical still requires interpretation. A raised hand might depict an obstacle, measure a height or simply request attention. The body supplies possibilities, not a universal dictionary.
In Mind and Nature, Bateson develops his interest in relations and recurring patterns across different descriptions. His comparisons between organisms invite attention to the organisation of parts, rather than to a list of isolated similarities. Applied to metaphor, this encourages a precise question: which relationship is being carried from one description into another? [4]
Who belongs to the Palo Alto story?
“Bateson and the Palo Alto group” is convenient shorthand, but it can conceal different collaborations. Bateson, Don D. Jackson, Jay Haley and John H. Weakland jointly authored the original 1956 double-bind paper. Paul Watzlawick, Janet Helmick Beavin and Jackson later wrote Pragmatics of Human Communication, published in 1967. The latter book is not a work by Bateson, even though it draws on ideas associated with his research. [5] [6]
Janet Beavin Bavelas’s retrospective Writing with Paul is valuable here. She describes the book as a creative synthesis, shaped by the authors’ own interests in communication and observation. Her account helps resist the temptation to treat “Palo Alto” as one author with one unchanging doctrine. Later work in dialogue research also developed and questioned aspects of the earlier programme. [7]
Connections with embodied metaphor
Readers familiar with embodied cognition may recognise a shared interest in bodily activity, perception and situated meaning. The research questions nevertheless differ. An experiment on how a sensory experience affects a judgement addresses a different issue from Bateson’s account of how participants recognise the frame of an interaction. Evidence relevant to one question does not automatically settle the other.
A useful comparison therefore keeps two levels in view. We can investigate what experiences and processes contribute to producing or understanding a metaphor. We can also investigate how the metaphor functions between people: how it is introduced, taken up, challenged or abandoned. These enquiries can inform each other, provided their claims and methods remain explicit.
Reading Bateson with care
Bateson writes through examples, comparisons and theoretical proposals. Some passages are exploratory; some reflect the scientific assumptions of their period. His clinical writings require particular historical care. Their importance in the development of communication theory does not establish their psychiatric explanations, and a suggestive account of metaphor does not by itself demonstrate a therapeutic effect.
For readers of metaphor, the most productive starting point is a discipline of attention. Record the actual expression. Notice the accompanying action. Establish what was happening immediately before it. Then examine the response. In the project discussion with which we began, “going round in circles” becomes informative through the work the two colleagues do with it. Bateson’s contribution is to make that surrounding activity part of the question.
References and further reading
- Bateson, G. (1972/1987). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Jason Aronson edition consulted. Source
- Bateson, G. (1955). A theory of play and fantasy. Psychiatric Research Reports, 2, 39–51. Also collected in Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Source
- Bateson, G. (1954/1987). Metalogue: Why a swan? In Steps to an Ecology of Mind (pp. 43–47). Jason Aronson. Originally published in Impulse (1954). Source
- Bateson, G. (1979). Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. E. P. Dutton. See especially the Introduction and Chapter VI, section 3, “Abduction”. Source
- Bateson, G., Jackson, D. D., Haley, J., & Weakland, J. (1956). Toward a theory of schizophrenia. Behavioral Science, 1(4), 251–264. Source
- Watzlawick, P., Beavin, J. H., & Jackson, D. D. (1967). Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes. W. W. Norton. See Chapters 2 and 3. Source
- Bavelas, J. B. (2007). Writing with Paul. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 33(3), 295–297. Source