Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry.

RUESCH, Jürgen, & Geoffrey Bateson.

Published by New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1951

About this Item

First edition, first printing. Jointly written by a psychiatrist and an anthropologist, the book discusses the role of communication in linking individuals both to each other and to larger groups, and the implications of this for the practice of psychiatry and the discipline of sociology. "According to Ruesch and Bateson, the self that was the subject of psychiatry was enmeshed in and largely shaped by a complex web of information exchange. In keeping with Wiener's cybernetics, they viewed social life as a system of communication and the individual as both a key element within that system and a system in his or her own right" (Turner, pp. 53). This copy has the inked ownership signature to the title page, and a few pencilled annotations to the text, of the Czech-born psychiatrist Robert J. Weil (1909-2002), a founding member of the Canadian Psychiatric Association - "one of the many clinical psychiatrists of the 1930s who, in his research, displayed a profound interest in a great variety of psychiatric and related areas ranging from clinical nosology and psychoanalysis to the neuropathology and histology of the brain" (Stahnisch, p. 14). Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 2006; Frank W. Stahnisch, A New Field in Mind, 2020. Octavo. Original brown cloth, spine lettered in gilt. With dust jacket. Slight bumping at extremities; jacket with light rubbing and soiling, slight wear at extremities, unclipped. A very good copy in very good jacket.

Seller Inventory # 148926

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry.
• Publisher: New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1951
• Edition: 1st Edition