Food for Thought – Double bind or the tyranny of the paradoxical injunction

An idea, a book, a concept, a “matter to think about” that we share with you to open reflection, discover new subjects and lead you to (re)think from another angle.

“The manager must do everything and its opposite, he is stuck between the hammer and the anvil,” notes Olivier Ruthardt, HR Director of Malakoff Humanis, on the occasion of the latest HR Meetings of the Le Monde group organized each month avenue Pierre Mendès-France around ten human resources personalities. Finding the right balance between performance and well-being, autonomy and control, personal initiative and collective purpose, supervision and motivation, engagement and distancing, ethics and interest, private happiness and public virtue, conviction and responsibility, such is the challenge of the manager.

More than ever, with the hybridization of work, its digitalization and its de-linearization, the manager is exposed to the tyranny of the paradoxical injunction, observed with one voice the ten HR directors gathered on November 7. The function has become so demanding and so complex that, according to a recent APEC study, almost 60% of French executives prefer not to become managers because they consider themselves not up to the soft skills the position requires. The hammer and the anvil, this is exactly the situation of double bind, double constraint, whose most popular examples are the three following injunctions so frequently heard within families as within companies: “Show a little initiative!” “Be more spontaneous!” or “Quickly forget what I just told you!” In science fiction novels, this gives the classic situation where a robot is programmed by asking it both to self-destruct at the end of its mission and to self-protect during its mission: will it execute the program, which is its vocation as a robot, and destroy itself, or will it seek to protect itself beyond its mission, which would prove that it is capable of interpreting its program differently, thus contradicting its nature as a robot?

In the 1960s, the anthropologist and epistemologist Gregory Bateson, with the Palo Alto School, made the double bind the origin of schizophrenia, analyzed as a defense mechanism against a contradiction from which it is rationally impossible to escape. The subject submitted to the double bind locks himself in silence or in the division of his own self so as not to have to suffer from the blocked situation imposed on him by the paradoxical injunction. A classic problem of Zen Buddhism taken up by Bateson is posed in these terms: the master says to his disciple “If you say this stick is real I hit you, if you say this stick is not real I hit you, if you say nothing I hit you.” What is the only good answer of the disciple? To snatch the stick from the master’s hands. It is a meta-answer, in other words an answer that dissolves the terms of the question by changing the context. What the schizophrenic fails to do, the disciple of the Zen master manages to do, thus reminding us that there exist, in life as in business, two major types of solutions: those that solve the problem and those that dissolve the problem. Ronald Laing, the father of anti-psychiatry, translated in the 1970s the double constraint with his concept of knot, illustrated by the clinical case of one of his patients: a young man lives painfully under the double psychic grip of his mother and his father, the mother having repeated to him throughout his childhood that he resembled his father and the father that he resembled his mother. The subject, unable to untie the double identificatory injunction that blocks him, will live as a male lesbian, which is not the easiest condition to live.

How to get out of the dead end that can go so far as to threaten the balance of an existence and the mental health of a subject? Because one does not play with paradoxical injunctions as one can play with simple intellectual paradoxes which make a lively debate or a brilliant conversation.

Escaping the double bind requires a change of level and scale. One must go above, through or beside the terms of the question or the prescription. This is what humor and analogy notably allow. Humor unlocks any frozen communication situation between two interlocutors because it invalidates their respective positions of authority, leads them to take a step back and to question the role play and its conventional distribution that any exchange presupposes. Analogy unties the relations between two terms by showing what they could be in another context or in a parallel world. Humor and analogy, operating a displacement, a decentering in language as in thought, are thus two precious resources to escape the regime of paradoxical injunction to which our family and professional lives are increasingly frequently subjected. There are loops that must be closed and others, more dangerous, that must be learned to unclose. It is a longer and more painful learning but oh how much more liberating.