After this event, which transformed a private family tragedy into a public scandal, the parents' ambitious expectations fell on Gregory.

Although initially reluctant to join the intelligence services, Bateson served in the OSS during World War II along with dozens of other anthropologists.

He was upset by his wartime experience and disagreed with his wife over whether science should be applied to social planning or used only to foster understanding rather than action.

[17] The 2014 novel Euphoria by Lily King is a fictionalized account of Bateson's relationships with Mead and Reo Fortune in pre-WWII New Guinea.

He therefore claims that the Treaty of Versailles and the development of cybernetics—which for him represented the possibility of improved relationships—are the only two anthropologically important events of the twentieth century.

The book was named after the 'naven' rite, an honorific ceremony among the Iatmul, still continued today, that celebrates first-time cultural achievements.

[11]: 136  Additionally, some women smear mud in the faces of other relatives, beat them with sticks, and hurl bawdy insults.

Bateson's experiences with the Iatmul led him to publish a book in 1936 titled Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View (Cambridge University Press).

[22] Until Bateson published Naven, most anthropologists assumed a realist approach to studying culture, in which one simply described social reality.

Instead, Bateson continued, the naven rite filled this function by regularly ensuring exchanges of food, valuables, and sentiment between mothers' brothers and their sisters' children, or between separate lineages.

The ethological point of view interpreted the ritual in terms of the conventional emotions associated with normative male and female behaviour, which Bateson called ethos.

In effect, naven allowed men and women to experience momentarily the emotional lives of each other, thereby to achieve a level of psychological integration.

That is to say, his overall point was not to describe Iatmul culture of the naven ceremony but to explore how different modes of analysis, using different premises and analytic frameworks, could lead to different explanations of the same sociocultural phenomenon.

[23] From March 1936 until February 1938, Bateson traveled to Bali with his new wife Margaret Mead to study the people of the village of Bajoeng Gede.

[11]: 151  Here, Lipset states, "in the short history of ethnographic fieldwork, film was used both on a large scale and as the primary research tool.

Bateson notes, "The child responds to [a mother's] advances with either affection or temper, but the response falls into a vacuum.

[11]: 155  Their aim to replicate the Balinese project on the relationship between child-raising and temperament, and between conventions of the body – such as pose, grimace, holding infants, facial expressions, etc.

In 1956 in Palo Alto, Bateson and his colleagues Donald Jackson, Jay Haley, and John Weakland[6] articulated a related theory of schizophrenia stemming from double bind situations.

The first place where double binds were described (though not named as such) was according to Bateson, in Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh (a semi-autobiographical novel about Victorian hypocrisy and cover-up).

[27] Full double bind requires several conditions to be met: The strange behaviour and speech of schizophrenics were explained by Bateson et al. as an expression of this paradoxical situation, and were seen in fact as an adaptive response, which should be valued as a cathartic and transformative experience.

The double bind was originally presented (probably mainly under the influence of Bateson's psychiatric co-workers) as an explanation of part of the etiology of schizophrenia.

Through this he suggests the following three expectations:[28] The fifth theoretical position which Bateson believes is supported by his data is that characteristics within an organism that have been modified due to environmental stresses may coincide with genetically determined attributes.

The seventh and final theory he believes to be supported is the idea that, on rare occasions there will be populations whose changes will not be in accordance with the thesis presented within this paper.

He saw the natural ecological system as innately good as long as it was allowed to maintain homeostasis[29] and that the key unit of survival in evolution was an organism and its environment.

[29] Bateson presents Occidental epistemology as a method of thinking that leads to a mindset in which man exerts an autocratic rule over all cybernetic systems.

[29] In exerting his autocratic rule man changes the environment to suit him and in doing so he unbalances the natural cybernetic system of controlled competition and mutual dependency.

By acting with this greater wisdom of the supreme cybernetic system as a whole man can change his relationship to Mind from one of schism, in which he is endlessly tied up in constant competition, to one of complementarity.

Bateson argues for a culture that promotes the most general wisdom and is able to flexibly change within the supreme cybernetic system.

[40] His other daughter the filmmaker Nora Bateson released An Ecology of Mind, a documentary that premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival.

The group collaborated with the American Society for Cybernetics for a joint meeting in July 2012 at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in California.