FrançaisConference : The international circulation of ideas in Europe's social sciences
« The European importation of the « Palo Alto Group » ideas : an auto-ethnographic approach »
Author/s : Yves Winkin
Other languages :
A small group of American anthropologists, linguists and psychiatrists developed in the 5O’s an approach to « communication » which was meant to be an alternative to the « theory of communication » suggested in the late 40’s by Bell Lab’ scientist Claude Shannon. The first formulation of this alternative theory is to be found in G.Bateson and J.Ruesch’s Communication : The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (1952). G.Bateson is going to lead around the same period a group of young scientists assembled in Palo Alto ; they will forge the immensely successful « communicational » theory of schizophrenia known as the « double bind hypothesis ». Several members of Bateson’s team will found the « Mental Research Institute », a non residential psychiatric clinic, of which psychotherapeutic approach will progressively be known, especially in France, as the « Palo Alto School ». One of the MRI associates, Paul Watzlawick, will regularly tour Europe in the 8O’s and 90’s to lecture about his books on « brief therapy » and «systemic therapy ».
To study the history of the Palo Alto Group is a way to respond to the call of the conference : »to follow up the international circulation of certain concepts in the social sciences in order to identify the logics of cultural assimilation and accommodation at work in this process of diffusion of ideas and to point out the alterations which often go along with the reception of discourses circulating around without no context ».
It happens that I played a role in the diffusion in France, and later in other European and Latin-American countries (via Spanish and Portuguese translations) of some of the ideas offered by Bateson and people associated with him. Back in 1981 from a few years of study at the Annenberg School for Communication (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia), I published at the Editions du Seuil (Paris) a book titled La Nouvelle Communication. The book was built on an introduction, a set of key papers by Bateson and others, and a few interviews. I deliberately step out of the frame built by the Palo Alto Group but I try to demonstrate that an « invisible college » was at work in the 50’s and 60’s, pushing for a new definition of what communication is all about. The book is going to know a wide circulation, both in the professional psychological circles and the collegiate communicational milieux. It will help shape a different vision of communication studies, which would not be confused with media studies.
I would like to trace the history of this dual emergence, on the basis on my own experienc. I know how hazardous an « auto-ethnographic » method may be (just as « ego-history ») : possibilities and limitations will have to be scrutinized. In order to discuss the logics of cultural assimilation and accommodation at work in this process of European intellectual importation, I will focus on notions as « double bind », « invisible college » or « non verbal communication ».
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