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In 1956, Bateson and colleagues published their seminal paper on double bind theory. Though long ago discounted as a truly etiological theory of schizophrenia, the double bind hypothesis left an enduring and unshakable impression, for perhaps what is most maddening in life are repeated encounters with feeling “damned if one does and damned if one doesn't.”
The double bind hypothesis, however, went much further than this colloquialism but, in so doing, often defied operational definition. In her review of the many attempts to empirically capture the double bind situation, Abeles (1976) concluded that investigators were “researching the unresearchable” (p. 113). Sluzki (1976) pointed out, however, that “what the group was really most interested in was not the observables per se, but the underlying pattern (structure) the observables eventually revealed” (p. 162).
It is precisely the underlying patterns in the analytic relationship to which this investigation of the double bind hypothesis in contemporary psychoanalytic thought is devoted. It is my belief that the prevailing psychoanalytic dialogue in the United States from the early 1950s to the early 1960s was so grounded in Freudian-based