and for Laing "one of the most important questions, therefore, is whether such mistrust of her 'feelings' and the testimony of others arises from persistent inconsistencies within an original nexus." The closed nexus and the double bind Laing and his colleagues suggested that a family nexus included both immediate family, and extra-familial people closely associated with the family and its world-view. Laing argued that a closed nexus would use its energy so as to unconsciously block out any threats to its identity, keeping all interchanges at a boring, repetitive level. Building on Kleinian accounts of social phantasy systems, and the sense of unquestioned reality they can generate, Laing argued that within such systems patterns of communication were multi-layered and deceptive. He also used W. R. Bion's account of how a group's basic assumptions could radiate "long silences, sighs of boredom, movements of discomfort...the hostility of the individuals was being contributed to the group anonymously". As his associate Joseph Berke put it, in such a nexus "a unique pattern of communication could be made out. People did not talk to each other, but at each other, and tangentially, not directly....what people said was often contradicted by the way they said it (tone of voice and/or facial and bodily movements)." Further light was shed on such interactions by Gregory Bateson's concept of the double bind - "a situation in which contradictory demands are being put upon a child (or patient) in such a way that there is no avenue of escape or challenge". Laing considered that the concept allowed a completely new understanding of what a familial environment could entail: "this paradigm of an insoluble 'can't win' situation, specifically destructive of self-identity" greatly illuminated the way the subject's "disturbed pattern of communication...[was] a reflection of, and reaction to, the disturbed and disturbing pattern characterizing his or her family of origin." In such a light, he considered that "mental illness" might be the outcome of a problematic configuration of a family nexus more than a necessary result of the nexus itself: in the words of Charles Rycroft, the psychotic is "the overt casualty of a deeply concealed family tragedy...the end-result of complex and skew[ed] interactions within his family." As Laing was careful to point out, however, it was not "a matter of laying the blame at anyone's door. The untenable position, the 'can't win' double-bind, the situation of checkmate, is by definition not