Jay Haley suggests that there are 4 elements to all communication:
1. Speaker
2. Message
3. Receiver
4. Context
Haley summarises this as follows:
1. “I
2. am saying something,
3. to you,
4. in this situation.”
The only area I have problems with is defining context. When examining Bateson’s necessary ingredients for a schizogenic double-bind situation, he says that two or more persons are needed. I think it is a far higher number of persons required, but only two need to be actually present in the situation, as it is occurring at the time of the double bind.
For example, if “I [as a nurse] say something to you (a patient) in this situation (a psyche ward)”, there may be only two of us directly involved or even present in that communication, but there are a heck of a lot more people in the background to enable us to be respectively designated “nurse” and “patient” – otherwise the context just wouldn’t be stable enough for our respective identities to themselves remain stable (and vice versa and round and round she goes…).
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