Family systems therapists are a rare breed, for we see the world from a different angle. Simply put, our particular slant is that we look for the interconnections and relationships between people instead of seeing people as separate independent individuals. And for teaching us this unique way of seeing the world, family therapists are indebted in large part to Gregory Bateson.

A giant among twentieth century thinkers, Bateson was at once biologist, ecologist, anthropologist, cyberneticist, family therapist, and creative thinker. As ecologist, he taught us that human beings act in ways that are destructive to fragile ecological systems because we do not see the interdependencies between natural systems and our own lives…

Read full review here…

Marilyn Wedge, Ph.D.

Family systems therapists are a rare breed, as we see the world from a different angle from most people and even from most other therapists. Simply put, our particular slant is that we look at the interconnections and relationships between people instead of seeing them as separate independent individuals. For teaching us this unique way of seeing the world, family therapists are indebted in large part to Gregory Bateson.

A giant among twentieth century thinkers, Bateson was at once biologist, ecologist, anthropologist, cyberneticist, family therapist, and creative thinker. As ecologist, he taught us that human beings act in ways that are destructive to fragile ecological systems because we do not see the interdependencies between natural systems and our own lives. As anthropologist, he taught us that behaviors and words have no meaning outside of cultural contexts. As cyberneticist, he taught us that change in one part of a system can be manifested in an entirely different part of the system in unexpected different ways. As family therapist, he taught us that pathologies reside not in individuals but in the patterns of communication between individuals. As creative thinker, he taught us that the language of complex systems, including family systems, is metaphor.

Nora Bateson, Gregory’s daughter, has made an exquisite film that is at once a tribute to her remarkable father and an elegant expression of his ideas. An Ecology of Mind, the title of both the film and one of Gregory Bateson’s books, is a film about mind and nature, which Bateson believed were a unity even though our language and culture leads us to believe that they are separate. It is a film about the relationships between living things told tenderly through a metaphor of a relationship — Nora’s relationship with her father.

The narrative leads us on a journey past a series of “roadmaps” in Gregory’s career: relationships, difference, epistemology, cybernetics, changeability, patterns, and of course that enigmatic cornerstone of family systems thinking, the double bind. The film conveys these complex ideas in such a way as to take us right inside them so that we see them as clearly as pebbles in a crystalline mountain stream. That the film accomplishes this is a testament to the filmmaker’s artistry and her grasp of her father’s subtle and unique style of thinking.

Perhaps the deepest idea that the film tackles is the pressing problem of our global double bind. Civilization, Gregory Bateson believed, is on the road to destruction unless we give up thinking in linear and material ways. The double bind that we now face is this: on the one hand, we want to preserve our natural environment; on the other, everything we do to grow our economy and preserve our standard of living disrupts the natural environment and our relationships with it. Nora, like her father, suggests that we must raise our consciousness and learn to think in new ways to escape our pathology of wrong thinking. She quotes Einstein: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” We must give up making arbitrary distinctions between human beings and the rest of nature and start thinking instead in terms of the interconnections among all living beings.

The film suggests that we face not only an ecological double bind, but a social one as well — voiced in the film by California Governor Jerry Brown. Brown says that we now find ourselves in a situation of social inequality. The proposed solution is to grow the economy. However, the result of growing the economy is more inequality (the rich get richer). Somehow we must break out of the level of consciousness that contains this contradiction. Nora Bateson suggests that we must question authority and mainstream thought patterns in order to think ourselves out of this pathological situation. Although the film predates the Wall Street protesters, their attempt to raise our consciousness about the social double bind seems like an important first step along the road to a healthier society.

An Ecology of Mind is a beautiful and important film, and has been deservedly showing to sold-out audiences around the world since its premier at the Vancouver International Film Festival last year. Nora Bateson presents viewers not only with an intellectually challenging and inspiring work of art, but also with a glimpse of evanescent hope.

“I learned to converse with Gregory through Nora’s exchange with her father, in the Zen Koan-like, “The Questions are the Answers” metalogue.  This remarkable film by Nora about the Essence of Gregory, the Man, his Heart/Mind/Body; the scientist, the mystic, the sage is full of magic, humanity, humor and joy; most lovingly presented with sensitive intelligence and beauty.”

Chungliang Al Huang – founder, Living Tao Foundation; Director, Lan Ting Institute, author, “Embrace Tiger, Return To Mountain: The Essence of Tai Ji”, co-author with Alan Watts, “Tao: The Watercourse Way”

“‘The major problems in the world,’ said Gregory Bateson, ‘are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.’ Nora Bateson’s brilliant film magically liberates our minds to discover that difference, and so dissolve it. Edwin Land said that people who seem to have had a new idea have often just stopped having an old idea. Gregory Bateson taught us how to stop having the most fundamental old ideas—the static, separating, reductionist fictions that dis-integrate an integrated world. Nora Bateson’s beautiful portrait of her father’s key insights is a stunningly effective antidote for a new generation that now needs his wisdom more than ever. It is really a remarkable and wonderful film. It will do much good.”

Amory B. Lovins – Chairman and Chief Scientist, Rocky Mountain Institute

“Nora Bateson combines imaginative graphics with fascinating documentary footage and illuminating interviews to present her father’s intellectual legacy against the backdrop of his relationship with his youngest child, the filmmaker herself.

This unique documentary will be an invaluable resource to the many who have drawn on Gregory Bateson’s ideas – myself included – and to those for whom this will be an enlightening introduction.”

Deborah Tannen - New York Times Bestselling Author, Speaker, Professor at Georgetown University

“An amazing film.”

Wade Graham – writer, Harpers and Los Angeles Times

Wild River Review, Jan. 2012 LINDISFARNE CAFE – Film Review – An Ecology of Mind:

A Daughter’s Portrait of Gregory Bateson

by Lauren McConnell

“What pattern connects the crab to the lobster,” muses anthropologist, philosopher, and systems theorist Gregory Bateson in An Ecology of Mind (2011), filmmaker Nora Bateson’s award-winning tribute to her father.

“And the orchid to the primrose,” he continues, “and all the four of them to me? And me to you?”

Beneath these examples, Gregory Bateson believed that the only question we really need to ask is, “How are things interrelated?”

During the course of his 76 years, Bateson, born in 1904, challenged “the arbitrary division between science and art,” exploring subjects in terms of their functions and relationships, and ultimately, in their own contexts rather than in an analytical vacuum.  In a synthesis of science art, Bateson sought “the pattern which connects” forming the basis of his work and and the theme of his daughter’s tribute to him.

Nora Bateson begins and ends An Ecology of Mind with clips from her family’s private collection. We see Gregory Bateson, already in his seventies (he is the father of anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson from his marriage to anthropologist Margaret Mead), walking with 10-year-old Nora along the Pacific shore below the family home. Preserved in antique color, the clips reveal the tenderness between father and daughter and his care in teaching her how to “see” creatures within a fold of rock or the richness of life within a tidal pool. These interludes give the viewer a glimpse into the depth of Nora Bateson’s relationship with her father and elevate the film from mere biography.

“I made An Ecology of Mind to illluminate the dynamic interrealtionships of life at all levels, global politics, biology, communication, evolution and culture told through the relationship between father and daughter,” says Nora Bateson.

To understand her father, Nora Bateson uses rare, previously unreleased footage including clips from her father’s lectures. A witty and engaging speaker, Gregory Bateson believed that our analytical, left-brained predisposition to divide and dissect is at the root of the destructive tendencies exhibited by humanity. He said, “The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.”

An Ecology of Mind features interviews with a wide-ranging group of thinkers who knew Bateson and were influenced by his work, including California Governor Jerry Brown, physicist and systems theorist Fritjof Capra, Whole Earth Catalogue publisher Stewart Brand, cultural philosopher and poet William Irwin Thompson; and Nora’s sister, Mary Catherine Bateson.

Gregory Bateson’s depth and range are hard to quantify, and Nora Bateson emphasizes that while he was trained as a scientist, he spoke in a language of metaphor and analogy, quoting from Lewis Carroll and William Blake—claiming that if science is a way of understanding and explaining nature, so is art.

In fact, Gregory Bateson thought that “any contact with art is an unconscious exploration of relationships.” Telling a story, reading a poem, and listening to jazz engages us in the “thinking that is most in synch with Nature.”

As Nora Bateson puts it, “Metaphor is the language of relationships, the language of natural systems, in which there’s room to communicate in spectrums of possibility instead of tightly defined cul-de-sacs.” In order to make the most of our world, we need to adjust the lens to see what holds natural systems together, to ask again and again, “What is the pattern that connects?”

In an analysis of her father’s work, Nora Bateson adds, “This is a radical step in threading the world back together from the inside, because by asking the question, we realize that the patterns are always changing, and that it is the potential for ideas to adapt, develop, and change lends us stability. We cannot step into the same river twice, or kiss the same person twice, and it is this promise of change that gives us the hope that the world will change for the better.”

Gregory Bateson also coined the term “double-bind,”which addressed the complexity of communication and context where, for example, a person may use words percieved as positive, “I love you,” but their body language reveals the opposite emotion. How we react to conflicting signals creates a “double bind” situation.

According to Bateson, if we are faced with a double-bind, it does not mean that there is no hope of resolution—merely that we must look for an answer from a different angle. The multiple perspectives revealed by Bateson’s “pattern which connects” give us the creative impulse we need to find these solutions, to imagine a third way, if you will.

An Ecology of Mind is an inspiring, meditative film that shows Gregory Bateson range and depth and ultimately gives us a larger glimpse into our place within nature and the cosmos, asking us to consider: What pattern connects art to science, and the cave to the universe, and all of that to us?

Bateson–father and daughter–have not only asked a challenging question, they have given us the tools to reimagine our world.

from http://www.wildriverreview.com/film-review/an-ecology-of-mind/Nora-Bateson/lauren-mcconnell/January-2012

“For me, watching Nora Bateson’s film was overwhelming”

- Read full review here

The documentary An Ecology of Mind, which won a Golden SpIFFy award at the just-completed Spokane International Film Festival, is playing this weekend only at the Magic Lantern Theatre. Following is the review that I did for Spokane Public Radio.

The task she took on was hardly easy. Pinning Bateson down takes a fair amount of effort. Coming up with a simple definition of, say, systems theory is one thing. Doing so in a way that educates the average filmgoer without making her film feel like a mere academic exercise is something else entirely. Yet Nora Bateson manages to do so by always keeping the man she knew at the center. By using historical film footage both of him and shot by him – remnants of the work he and Mead did in South Seas native cultures – to illustrate the points she wants to make. By interviewing a coterie of people, friends, colleagues and family, who knew Bateson best.

What becomes amply clear is that Bateson is needed today more than ever. His ability to see life from different angles runs counter to the intolerance evident in so much of what passes for contemporary public debate. In this era, which seems more and more to push individuals more toward black-and-write thinking – with any kind of larger shared truth conveniently, often intentionally, ignored – Bateson’s beliefs feel as fresh as they do refreshing.

Gregory Bateson took the first steps toward such a worldwide societal reunion long before he died at age 76 in 1980. His daughter, now, in a quietly profound way, has continued the journey. It’s up to the rest of us to complete the process. Watching “An Ecology of Mind” is a good place to start.

When we reflect on how environmental education can be innovated to meet the needs and challenges of today’s world, and if we also consider the role that the arts can play in this, we are well-advised to take a closer look at the groundbreaking work of the great thinker Gregory Bateson. The year 2010 saw the release of a highly interesting documentary on his work, entitled An Ecology of Mind. Completed more than thirty years after his death, filmmaker Nora Bateson (Gregory Bateson’s youngest daughter) directed a compelling hour-long introduction to the world of this thinking. Gregory Bateson was one of the most original thinkers of the late twentieth century. His research covered a vast array of different fields: anthropology, biology, psychology, and philosophy of science. He would often move himself across the boundaries of disciplines, and do so in highly innovative ways. Until now his work has been largely inaccessible to those outside of the academic community. With An Ecology of Mind, this is soon bound to change.

Bateson was quite different from most other university teachers. In the 1970’s he recounted how there was, almost every year, a vague complaint about his teaching. It was alleged that “Bateson knows something which he does not tell you,” or “There’s something behind what Bateson says, but he never says what it is.” As a teacher at the University of California, he would encourage his surprised students to read extensively in Alice in Wonderland. Lewis Carroll’s metaphoric language, he believed, would help them understand something of the human condition and the fundamental
processes in evolution.

Nora Bateson is Gregory Bateson’s youngest daughter, from his third marriage. For me, watching her film portrait of her father was an overwhelming experience. I had the strange sensation of seeing and listening to a person on film whose work I excitedly started to read decades ago. At the opening of the film Ms. Bateson says, “I am inviting you to do the thing he did best, which is to look at a thing – be it an earthworm, a number sequence, a tree, a formal definition of addiction, anything at all – from another angle.” Her father would twist things around endlessly to be sure he didn’t get stuck down a singular line of thinking. He would ask himself questions like: “What is the pattern that connects the crab to the lobster and the primrose to the orchid, and all of them to me, and me to you?” To learn about this pattern was his life’s purpose. His approach was radically different from conventional science, which is often more preoccupied with taking things apart. Bateson was a voice crying in the wilderness. “Why do our schools teach us nothing about the pattern which connects?” he asked in despair. There was another side to this, and a cause for great concern. “Break the pattern which connects,” he stated, “and you necessarily destroy all quality.”

Read the full review (pdf) here.