Family Nexus - The Closed Nexus and The Double Bind

The Closed Nexus and The Double Bind

'Three or four people in a closed nexus will maintain a status quo which suits them, forming a collusive alliance to neutralize anyone who threatens its stability'. Building on W. R. Bion's account 'of the numbing feeling of reality that is a concomitant of this state', and on Kleinian accounts of how 'we are all prone to be drawn into social phantasy systems ' - accounts of how a group's basic assumptions could radiate 'long silences, sighs of boredom, movements of discomfort...the hostility of the individuals was being contributed to the group anonymously' - Laing described how 'the energy of the nexus is used to prevent anything going on...exchanges are boring, repetitous, concerned only with trivia'.

Laing considered that 'in such a family nexus, any statement or gesture functions as something quite different from what it "appears" to be and no action can be "trusted" to "mean" what it seems'. As his associate Joseph Burke put it, in such a nexus 'a unique pattern of communication could be made out. People did not talk to each other, but at each other, and tangentially, not directly....what people said was often contradicted by the way they said it (tone of voice and/or facial and bodily movements)'.

Further light was shed on such interactions by Gregory Bateson's concept of the Double bind - 'used to describe a situation in which contradictory demands are being put upon a child (or patient) in such a way that there is no avenue of escape or challenge'. Laing considered that the concept 'has revolutionised the concept of what is meant by "environment"', and that 'this paradigm of an insoluble "can't win" situation, specifically destructive of self-identity' greatly illuminated the way the subject's 'disturbed pattern of communication... a reflection of, and reaction to, the disturbed and disturbing pattern characterizing his or her family of origin'. In such a light, what we call 'mental illness' is therefore perhaps more the outcome of a problematic configuration of the nexus than it is a necessary result of the nexus itself: the psychotic is 'the overt casualty of a deeply concealed family tragedy...the end-result of complex and skew interactions within his family'.

As Laing was careful to point out, however, it was not 'a matter of laying the blame at anyone's door. The untenable position, the "can't win" double-bind, the situation of checkmate, is by definition not obvious to the protagonists...The man at the bottom of the heap may be being crushed and suffocated to death without anyone noticing, much less intending it' in the wider nexus.