Name of Theory
Double Bind Theory of Family Systems
Synonyms
Double bind hypothesis; Double bind theory of paradoxical communication; The double bind theory of schizophrenia
Introduction
During the advent of the field of marriage and family therapy in the 1950s, Gregory Bateson assembled the Palo Alto Group – a team of scientists and psychiatrists to further study the nature of communication as it related to self-regulating systems via mechanisms of information, control, and feedback (Gibney 2006). This group from Palo Alto, California, was particularly interested in communication patterns in families where a member had developed schizophrenia, hoping to reject the strictly biological model of schizophrenia that was popular during that time (Nichols and Schwartz 2001). As a result, the group produced the landmark report Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia (Bateson et al. 1956), which offered the hypothesis that schizophrenia was not biologically caused, rather it was “caused and/or...
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Bateson, G., Jackson, D., Haley, J., & Weakland, J. (1956). Toward a theory of schizophrenia. Behavioural Science, 1, 251–264.
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Major, S., Fisher, A.R. (2019). Double Bind Theory of Family System. In: Lebow, J.L., Chambers, A.L., Breunlin, D.C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Couple and Family Therapy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49425-8_259
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49425-8_259
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