ISBN 345-23423-5-195 (US pbk)

Preface by Mark Engel;
Foreword ;
Introduction: The Science of Mind and Order ;

Part I: Metalogues


Metalogue: Why Do Things Get in a Muddle?
Metalogue: Why Do Frenchmen?
Metalogue: About Games and Being Serious
Metalogue: How Much Do You Know?
Metalogue: Why Do Things Have Outlines?
Metalogue: Why a Swan?
Metalogue: What Is an Instinct?

Part II: Form and Pattern in Anthropology

Culture Contact and Schismogenesis
Experiments in Thinking About Observed Ethnological Material
Morale and National Character
Bali: The Value System of a Steady State
Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art
Comment on Part II

Part III: Form and Pathology in Relationship

Social Planning and the Concept of Deutero-Learning
A Theory of Play and Fantasy
Epidemiology of a Schizophrenia
Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia
The Group Dynamics of Schizophrenia
Minimal Requirements for a Theory of Schizophrenia
Double Bind, 1969
The Logical Categories of Learning and Communication
The Cybernetics of 'Self': A Theory of Alcoholism
Comment on Part III

Part IV: Biology and Evolution

Illustrations for "A Re-examination of 'Bateson's Rule'"
The Role of Somatic Change in Evolution
Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication
A Re-examination of 'Bateson's Rule'

Part V: Epistemology and Ecology

Cybernetic Explanation
Redundancy and Coding
Conscious Purpose Versus Nature
Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation
Form, Substance, and Difference

Part VI: Crisis in the Ecology of Mind
From Versailles to Cybernetics
Pathologies of Epistemology
The Roots of Ecological Crisis
Ecology and Flexibility in Urban Civilization
The Published Work of Gregory Bateson

"The questions which the book raises are ecological: How do ideas interact? Is there some sort of natural selection which determines the survival of some ideas and the extinction or death of others? What sort of economics limits the multiplicity of ideas in a given region of mind? What are the necessary conditions for stability (or survival) of such a system or subsystems?

"Some of these questions are touched upon in the essays, but the main thrust of the book is to clear the way so that such questions can be meaningfully asked." [jacket blurb excerpt from the book, US pbk, 1973]