You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The mind is the control and regulatory system that governs the behavior of the human organism and as such is the sensorial manifestation of the somatic or bodily influences which direct this behavior. Cybernetics is a new scientific discipline concerned with the study of control and regulatory systems. While Freud's psychoanalytic techniques for studying the human mind appear to bear no resemblance to current cybernetic methodology, we must conclude that psychoanalytic concepts and data are in the final analysis the manifestation of cybernetic processes. One of the principal obstacles to the recognition by cyberneticists that psychoanalytic concepts are the proper concern of cybernetics is their persistent aversion to a recognition of the significance of instinct in general and love in particular. Psychoanalysts, on the other hand, appear concerned that the phenomenon of love will be lost in any study involving the machine science of cybernetics which to date has been unable to recognize that processes involving information and decision making are not the most characteristic features of human behavior.
Love is a prominent precipitate of biological evolution. As such, we have reason to presume, it represents a central feature in the regulatory and control processes that have accrued to man as a result of natural selection. Moreover, since regulation and control are in essence the subject matter of cybernetics, Freud's psychoanalytic theories and his theory of libido must harbor cybernetic principles which are of fundamental importance. One of these must be that in the human organism love is fundamentally associated with knowing and understanding. In essence, knowing and understanding are not possible in man without love. Knowing and understanding are intimately associated with the libidinal instinct to unify by contact or touch, and by the libidinal instinct to unify abstractly by being like or by becoming like (identification).