Double binds are often utilized as a form of control without open coercion—the use of confusion makes them difficult both to respond to and to resist.
Further complications arise when frequent double binds are part of an ongoing relationship to which the person or group is committed.
Thus, subjects may express feelings of extreme anxiety in such a situation, as they attempt to fulfill the demands of the primary injunction albeit with obvious contradictions in their actions.
[3] The term double bind was first used by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson and his colleagues (including Don D. Jackson, Jay Haley and John H. Weakland) in the mid-1950s in their discussions on complexity of communication in relation to schizophrenia.
Bateson made clear that such complexities are common in normal circumstances, especially in "play, humour, poetry, ritual and fiction" (see Logical Types below).
[4] He has hypothesized that patients with BPD engage in double bind communication as a result of their characteristic need-fear dilemma, a simultaneous need for and fear of closeness with other persons.
It may be a declaration of passion or a serene reaffirmation, insincere and/or manipulative, an implied demand for a response, a joke, its public or private context may affect its meaning, and so forth.
Communication difficulties in ordinary life often occur when meta-communication and feedback systems are lacking or inadequate or there is not enough time for clarification.
The classic example given of a negative double bind is of a mother telling her child that she loves them, while at the same time turning away in disgust, or inflicting corporal punishment as discipline:[6] the words are socially acceptable; the body language is in conflict with it.
One of Bateson's consultants, Milton H. Erickson (5 volumes, edited by Rossi) eloquently demonstrated the productive possibilities of double binds through his own life, showing the technique in a brighter light.
The Double Bind Theory was first articulated in relationship to schizophrenia when Bateson and his colleagues hypothesized that schizophrenic thinking was not necessarily an inborn mental disorder but a pattern of learned helplessness in response to cognitive double-binds externally imposed.
At that time, 18 years before Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was officially recognized, the veterans had been saddled with the catch-all diagnosis of schizophrenia.
Bateson didn't challenge the diagnosis but he did maintain that the seeming nonsense the patients said at times did make sense within context, and he gives numerous examples in section III of Steps to an Ecology of Mind, "Pathology in Relationship".
The solution then is to create an escape from the conflicting logical demands of the double bind, in the world of the delusional system (see in Towards a Theory of Schizophrenia – Illustrations from Clinical Data).
In Learning III, the double bind is contextualized and understood as an impossible no-win scenario so that ways around it can be found.
[8] After many years of research into schizophrenia, Bateson continued to explore problems of communication and learning, first with dolphins, and then with the more abstract processes of evolution.
Bateson emphasized that any communicative system characterized by different logical levels might be subject to double bind problems.
"[9] Bateson used the fictional Bread and Butter Fly (from Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There) to illustrate the double bind in terms of natural selection.
Most significant here is Bateson's exploration of what he later came to call "the pattern that connects"[10]—that problems of communication which span more than one level (e.g., the relationship between the individual and the family) should also be expected to be found spanning other pairs of levels in the hierarchy (e.g. the relationship between the genotype and the phenotype): "We are very far, then, from being able to pose specific questions for the geneticist; but I believe that the wider implications of what I have been saying modify somewhat the philosophy of genetics.
We have disclosed the possibility of a relationship of these levels which orthodox genetics would deny, and we have disclosed that at least in human societies the evolutionary system consists not merely in the selective survival of those persons who happen to select appropriate environments but also in the modification of family environment in a direction which might enhance the phenotypic and genotypic characteristics of the individual members.
[13] According to Girard, the "internal mediation" of this mimetic dynamic "operates along the same lines as what Gregory Bateson called the 'double bind'.
The more attentive the child is to these seductive words, and the more earnestly he responds to the suggestions emanating from all sides, the more devastating will be the eventual conflicts.
By a mental shortcut that is both eminently logical and self-defeating, he convinces himself that the violence itself is the most distinctive attribute of this supreme goal!
Ever afterward, violence will invariably awaken desire...Neuro-linguistic programming, a pseudoscientific approach to communication, also makes use of the expression "double bind".