Crazy, Huh?

A psychiatrist in California believes that insanity is nothing but a breakdown in ability to communicate.*

In collaboration with British-born Anthropologist Gregory Bateson, Swiss-born Dr. Jurgen Ruesch has written Communication, the Social Matrix of Psychiatry (Norton; $4.50), in an attempt to tie insanity and psychiatry with communication engineering and other sciences (among them, cybernetics) into a single system. Samples from Ruesch's chapters:

"Interference with goal-directed behavior of an individual gives rise to the alarm reaction. If the interference can be successfully disposed of or avoided altogether, the alarm reaction will recede. However, frequently the source of interference cannot be avoided or eliminated. Under such circumstances, the sharing of anxiety with nonanxious or non-threatening individuals by means of communication becomes an efficient device for tolerating the impact of interference . . .

"Successful communication with self and with others implies correction by others as well as self-correction. In such a continuing process, up-to-date information about the self, the world, and the relationship of the self to the world leads to the acquisition of appropriate techniques, and eventually increases the individual's chances of mastery of life. Successful communication therefore becomes synonymous with adaptation and life."

If Psychiatrist Ruesch's definition is correct, Author Ruesch is in a pretty interesting condition himself.

* An older definition: insanity is being in the outcast minority--i.e., being voted insane by the majority.

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