Parental Threats
Double Binds and Parental Threats
Threatening language raises a distinction between what a speaker says, what they intend and what a listener understands. Calling an expression a figure of speech does not establish that the listener experienced it as harmless. Equally, an expression alone does not prove a particular unconscious belief, childhood experience or later psychological outcome.
What is a double bind?
Gregory Bateson, Don D. Jackson, Jay Haley and John Weakland introduced the double-bind hypothesis in their 1956 paper Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia. Their account concerns repeated, conflicting messages at different levels, within a relationship in which the recipient cannot readily escape or comment on the contradiction. It is more specific than an ordinary dilemma or any unpleasant remark. Original paper.
The historical hypothesis should not be treated as proof that a particular parental phrase causes schizophrenia or another disorder. Nor does a threat automatically meet all the conditions described in that account.
Austin's discussion of parental threats
In Double Binds and Parental Threats to Survival, Andrew T. Austin examines a communicative conflict: a child may be expected to take a warning seriously, yet criticised for believing that the threatened harm could happen. The article discusses the relation between threatening imagery, authority and the child's position in the relationship. This is Austin's interpretation within Metaphors of Movement. Austin's published article.
His discussion draws attention to the difference between dismissing an expression as figurative and considering the action it describes. It does not supply independent evidence that every listener forms the same image or draws the same conclusion. A reading involving ownership, lowering or crushing should therefore be attributed to the model rather than presented as an established fact about an individual parent or child.
Meaning and context
Three questions remain distinct when discussing this material:
- What do the words describe?
- How were they used within the particular interaction?
- What did the listener understand or experience?
The first can be discussed from the wording. The other two require information about the people and the situation. Neither a speaker's claim that a remark was a joke nor an analyst's literal reading settles all three questions.
This page concerns language and the history of an interpretative model. It does not establish clinical outcomes or the effectiveness of a treatment from the examples discussed.