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I am the observed relation between myself and observing myself. HEINZ VON FOERSTER
Levin (1970) raises the question why Freud had never developed an elaborate theory of the self. He speculates 'that Freud's understanding of the self is embodied and embedded in his technical rules'. The aim of this paper is not the development of a self-concept by means of a discussion of Freud's technical innovations, but we believe that the essential elements of the psychoanalytic process can be determined in the following way: a self-observationally controlled observer (analyst) observes a process of self-observation (patient).
In its search of a self-concept, psychoanalysis is at present being given ever-increasing support from rapid developments within the fields of cybernetic epistemology and theoretical biology. Von Foerster (1972) maintains:
What we need now is the description of the 'describer' or, in other words, we need a theory of the observer. Since to the best available knowledge it is only living organisms which would qualify as being observers, it appears that this task falls to the biologist. But he himself is a living being, which means that in his theory he has not only to account for himself, but also for his writing this theory.
Without a doubt, psychoanalysis will have the task of determining which detailed features of human self-description and self-/observation are operative.
Following Sandler & Rosenblatt's (1962) organismic argument that the control of reality is in essence the control of the subjective observation of this reality, we shall take a model of the human organismic self-observer as the core around which a psychoanalytic self-concept must be built up. We have taken a first step in this direction in a previous paper concerned with the concept of narcissism (Pritz & Mitterauer, 1977a) Our present paper is a continuation in the same direction.
We wish to give strong emphasis to Basch's (1973) proposal that much in psychoanalysis which has been thoug