Testov D.F. The Ideas of Trance, Play and Insanity in Gregory Bateson's Anthropology

Abstract: The article is devoted to the analysis of the video of Balinese ritual on the material that explores the relationship between Bateson’s anthropology and psychiatry. The crossdisciplinary nature of Bateson's researches that included anthropology, cybernetics, communication theoy, psychiatry, ethology and evolution theory raises a question about succession and relationships between different directions of his research projects. The author of the present article focuses on the analysis of the relationship between early visual and anthropological researches conducted by Gregory Bateson with regard to Bali (island) and later clinical researches on schizophrenia carried out in Palo Alto that led to the development of the theory of double bind. The methodology of the research involves the analysis of the visual anthropological document (video) for regular patterns that associate with the patterns of clinical illustrations. The interpretation of the central characters of ritual drama exposes the mechanisms of their transposition from Bateson’s early ethnographic research into clinical illustrations of his later works on psychiatry. It has been found that one of the Bateson’s key clinical examples, illustrating how double bind works can be considered as the inverse of Balinese ritual drama structure. This idea encourages to review the foundations of communicative theory of schizophrenia by G. Bateson in general and the concept of double bind in particular. 

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