I Robert Rogers

Until recently, there was no existing word for this complex of ideas, and in order to embrace the whole field by a single term, I felt constrained to invent one. Hence, “Cybernetics,” which I derived from the Greek word kubernetes, or “steersman,” the same Greek word from which we eventually derive our word “governor.”

In Robots, Men, and Minds1 Ludwig von Bertalanffy asserts that modern psychology has failed to be human in aspiring to be scientific, as in the case of behaviorism, or else failed to be scientific in aspiring to be human. As early as 1895 a great humanist by the name of Sigmund Freud aspired to be scientific in his observations about human nature. He even entitled one of his early papers “Project for a Scientific Psychology.” But the superstructure of Freud's psychology as it evolved into psychoanalytic metapsychology has long seemed woefully unscientific from the perspective of general psychology and has recently suffered grievous attacks from within the pale of psychoanalysis itself by such scientifically minded people as George Klein, Robert Holt, and Roy Schafer, among others. Thus while psychoanalysis has experienced an expansion of its boundaries during the past three decades or so by the assimilation of what we call object-relations psychology, it has begun to suffer some profound doubts about the validity of its theoretical foundations, particularly with regard to its conceptualization of how man controls himself (the “ego”) and what makes his behavior so impulsive (libidinal and aggressive “drives”).

During this period of theoretical turmoil there may have been many who experienced something like the religious mystic's dark night of the soul and then either made an existential “leap of faith” toward unquestioning orthodoxy or else abandoned their former allegiances altogether. Probably still more have isolated what they could accept from what they could not and let it go at that without ever