double bind


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double bind

 [dŭ´b'l bīnd´]
a type of paradoxical communication or interaction in which one person demands a response to a message that contains mutually contradictory signals (verbal or nonverbal). The other person is unable to comment on the incongruity or to escape the situation.
Miller-Keane Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Medicine, Nursing, and Allied Health, Seventh Edition. © 2003 by Saunders, an imprint of Elsevier, Inc. All rights reserved.

dou·ble bind

a type of personal interaction in which one receives two mutually conflicting verbal or nonverbal instructions or demands from the same person or different people, resulting in a situation in which either compliance or noncompliance with either alternative threatens one of the needed relationships.
Farlex Partner Medical Dictionary © Farlex 2012

double bind

n.
A psychological impasse created when a person perceives that someone in a position of power is making contradictory demands, so that no response is appropriate.
The American Heritage® Medical Dictionary Copyright © 2007, 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
A situation in which option A and its alternative, option B, both have considerable disadvantages
Psychiatry An interpersonal dilemma in which a person is presented with mutually contradictory messages by another person, usually one who is respected by, or who has authority over, the person receiving the ‘mixed message’
Segen's Medical Dictionary. © 2012 Farlex, Inc. All rights reserved.
References in periodicals archive ?
(34) This refigures differently the double bind: one must tell the whole story, yet there can be no more stories.
Bodily detours: Sarah Kofman's narratives of childhood trauma
(2) And people who hear dilemmas as "double binds" are susceptible to even more debilitating emotional reactions.
Correctional contradictions: a structural approach to addressing officer burnout
Figuring into both the negative and the positive sides of my reader's double bind is this book's dual loyalty in generic terms.
Primo Levi: the biographer's challenge and the reader's double bind
In 1985, curiously including neither the Putnam paper nor that by Wood and Conrad in its bibliography, Kathleen Hall Jamieson's Beyond the Double Bind: Women and Leadership, appeared.
Paradoxes: No simple matter
Caddy is the one family member who could help Quentin escape from the family's double-bind pattern, but she too is tied to the double bind created for Quentin.
Faulkner's Family Crucible: Quentin's Dilemma
"When I became head of the physical and health education department, I was unaware of the double binds this leadership role would thrust upon me." Jamieson's book looks at these Catch 22 situations, by examining their roots in theology, biology, morality and the law.
Beyond the double bind: women & leadership
articulated in the Phenomenology of Spirit" (8) than as an example of self-reflexive criticism that demonstrates, in its exposition of Du Bois's Hegelianism, the deeply complex, even tricky work of (re)constructing the omnicritical genealogy which is Adell's own double bind. Like the dilemma faced by poststructuralists committed to theorizing African American literature (among whom Adell takes Henry Louis Gates, Houston Baker, and Robert Stepto to be most representative), "The Souls of Black Folk: Reading Across the Color Line" is most instructive when, paradoxically, it shows itself mired in the textual system that she observes Du Bois, by necessity, writing through.
Double-Consciousness/Double Bind: Theoretical Issues in Twentieth-Century Black Literature
The uncritical listener, for example, might choose one or both for the "worse" in the following double bind:
The red flags of persuasion
To address these questions, the connections between the two concepts within the family systems framework are assessed, and the case of one youngster's suicide attempts are discussed and placed in context to illustrate how double bind contingencies and boundary transgression may contribute to our understanding of how suicidal behavior occurs in adolescence.
A case of family dysfunction and teenage suicide attempt: applicability of a family systems paradigm
It represented a classic double bind. "Before Forest Ag, development became a self-fulfilling prophecy," Osterman said.
At home in the belly of the beast
Johnson astutely relates these ideas to Freud's analysis of the apparently contradictory relation of memory and perception, and then examines Derrida's style of writing by following closely several word-associations, such as ecart, entamer, economy, articulation, and the double bind. He then proceeds to examine Darwinian evolutionary theory, with its emphasis upon innovation, adaptation, non-teleological 'development', and on evolution as affecting and changing the codes through openness to mutation and feedback.
System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida
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