The class cannot be a member of itself nor can one of themembers be the class, since the term used for the class is of a different level of abstraction--adifferent Logical Type--from terms used for members. Although in formal logic there is anattempt to maintain this discontinuity between a class and its members, we argue that in thepsychology of real communications this discontinuity is continually and inevitably breached (2),and that a priori we must expect a pathology to occur in the human organism when certainformal patterns of the breaching occur in the communication between mother and child.

ple plausible ways to fill in the details in ways that either harm you or help you. These two morphed into a beast where I felt like I wasn't allowed to want anything I didn't immediately kno

The ability to communicate about communication, to comment uponthe meaningful actions of oneself and others, is essential for successful social intercourse. In anynormal relationship there is a constant interchange of metacommunicative messages such as"What do you mean?" or "Why did you do that?" or "Are you kidding me?" and so on

The only way the child can really escape from the situation is to comment on thecontradictory position his mother has put him in. However, if he did so, the mother would takethis as an accusation that she is unloving and both punish him and insist that his perception of thesituation is distorted.

Toput it another way, the mother is controlling the child's definitions of his own messages, as wellas the definition of his responses to her (e.g., by saying, "You don't really mean to say that," if heshould criticize her) by insisting that she is not concerned about herself but only about him

To put this another way, if the mother begins to feel affectionateand close to her child she begins to feel endangered and must withdraw from him; but she cannotaccept this hostile act and to deny it must simulate affection and closeness with her child. Theimportant point is that her loving behavior is then a comment on (since it is compensatory for)her hostile behavior and consequently it is of a different order of message than the hostilebehavior--it is a message about a sequence of messages. Yet by its nature it denies the existenceof those messages which it is about, i.e., the hostile withdrawal.

This means that he must deceive himself abouthis own internal state in order to support mother in her deception

the child is placed in a position where he must not accurately interpret hercommunication if he is to maintain his relationship with her.

The point is that he cannot choose theone alternative which would help him to discover what people mean; he cannot, withoutconsiderable help, discuss the messages of others. Without being able to do that, the humanbeing is like any self-correcting system which has lost its governor; it spirals into never-ending,but always systematic, distortions

The pathology enters when the victim himself either does not know that his responses aremetaphorical or cannot say so. To recognize that he was speaking metaphorically he would needto be aware that he was defending himself and therefore was afraid of the other person. To himsuch an awareness would be an indictment of the other person and therefore provoke disaster.

e responded literally because he was faced with a messagewhich asked him what he was doing at home when he should have been at the office, but whichdenied that this question was being asked by the way it was phrased. (Since the speaker felt itwasn't really his business, he spoke, metaphorically.)

Finally, the complete set of ingredients is no longer necessary when the victim haslearned to perceive his universe in double bind patterns.

"Do not see this as punishment"; "Do not see me as the punishingagent"; "Do not submit to my prohibitions"; "Do not think of what you must not do";"Do not question my love of which the primary prohibition is (or is not) an example"

Therefore, we must look not for somespecific traumatic experience in the infantile etiology but rather for characteristic sequentialpatterns. The specificity for which we search is to be at an abstract or formal level. Thesequences must have this characteristic: that from them the patient will acquire the mental habitswhich are exemplified in schizophrenic communication. That is to say, he must live in a universewhere the sequences of events are such that his unconventional communicational habits will b ein some sense appropriate

But metaphor is an indispensable tool of thought and expression--acharacteristic of all human communication, even of that of the scientist. The conceptual modelsof cybernetics and the energy theories of psychoanalysis are, after all, only labeled metaphors.The peculiarity of the schizophrenic is not that he uses metaphors, but that he uses unlabeledmetaphors.

inguistic innovations like E-Prime (and coining neologisms for new concepts) show up occasionally in movements lik

languages; ‘fixing’ language and terminology has been a perennial focus of Western politicians in the 20th & 21st c