The Computational Self by Robert M. Galatzer-Levy, M.D. 180 North Michigan Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60601 CIS PPN 722551101 This is a paper original delivered at the First Annual Mathematics and Psychoanalysis Meeting in New York, N.Y. on June 6, 1988. Any comments are very welcome. What I have to say today is more by way of posing a problem and indicating an area where I suspect the solution to lie than a coherent presentation of a new theory. I am going to talk about some elementary ideas from a branch of psychoanalysis called self psychology and some elementary ideas from computer science that seem to me to provide a framework for thinking about the self of self psychology and then invite you all to let me know whether what I have said has made sense and whether you can see directions for the development of these notions. Freud's effort to explain mental life on the basis of drives that are the psychological representations of biological disequilibria fell on hard times as he tried to work out the theory in detail. He introduced a new entity, the ego, dangerously close to a homunculus within the mind, that performed certain functions and vigorously protected itself from being "overwhelmed" or traumatized. The ego's functions included managing the persons relation to reality, regulations of drives, object relations, thought processing, defensive functions, perceptions and motor activity, and integration of all other psychological functions - its so called synthetic function. The concept of the ego became the center of American psychoanalytic theory in the forties ,fifties and sixties. Despite heroic, rigorous efforts to sharpen the terms's meaning, the confusion Freud left between the ego and the subjective experience of the self continued. This persistent confusions was not merely the result of intellectual sloppiness. Nor was it, as Bruno Bettleheim proposes, the result of Freud's English translators' discomfort the soul-like implications of the Freud's original idea. The difficult is more fundamental. The terminologic and theoretic confusion reflected a clinical reality. It often happens that people who functioned badly in the areas called "ego functions" also have major disturbances in their experience of the self and that the two types of difficulty are exacerbated or diminished in concert. The idea of the ego as a unitary entity is not just as a convenient, if confusing, name for the set of functions described earlier, a sort of waste basket for what is neither id nor superego. The term reflect the commonly observed covariation in these functions. The systematic exploration of the self experience began in psychoanalysis in the years following the second world war, though, of course the concept of self has been the object of study since the dawn of civilization. Although he had significant psychoanalytic precursors, notably in the work of Paul Federn, Erik Erikson was the first to propose that the core of much psychopathology lies in disorders of self experience. Erikson's concept of identity, which amalgamated the many sources of beliefs about who one is is both evocative of common experience and proved clinically useful. Many kinds of difficultly, as well a normal, and supernormal psychological development can be usefully explored as experiences of loss or diffusion of identity or attempts to establish a satisfactory identity where one was lacking. Erikson's work is problematic from a psychoanalytic point of view for two reasons. First, reading Erikson carefully one discovers that his wonderful portrayal of emotional states through imagery, metaphor and clinical detail is not matched by explicit, clear theoretical formulations. Second, his writings often focus on external environmental effects rather than people's psychological worlds and the manner of their construction. Erikson never systematically described his therapeutic approach to his patients. However, it is clear that he consistently placed a positive connotation on his patients' struggles. He demonstrated how manifest psychopathology could be understood as potentially successful attempts to achieve valuable identities, that while there might be difficulties in the way the patient's basic project and his ways of attempting to accomplish it were closer to healthy development than the patient or the society might recognize. Erikson's psychobiographical studies of Luther, Gandhi, Hitler and Shaw are messages to readers, many of them young, about the value of their struggles to form workable identities. Erikson's implicit view is that an appreciative stance toward the patients' struggles which include or dominated by external realities is therapeutic. In the years following the second world war Harry Stack Sullivan, observed that the experience of the self of many of his schizophrenic patients was grossly disturbed. Borrowing from the Chicago School of Sociology, most notably George Herbert Mead, Sullivan conceptualized the self as a summation of social roles, some of them retained without full awareness from archaic periods of development. In this "interpersonal theory" of psychology pathology resulted from a self system that was internal incongruent or problematic in terms of the environment. Therapeutic intervention consisted in understanding and appropriately revising the self system in the light of more mature and current understanding. What is central to our discussion is Sullivan's view that the self system was both the product of the external environment and made no sense whatever outside of a social system. Several analysts, notably Klein, Winnicott, Khan, Fairburn, Bion, Spitz, and Modell emphasized the role of holding environment, environmental container or the "mother" in the development of the self. From their very different perspectives each emphasized how the self's growth required an external situation of being "held" as the emerging and vulnerable self gained strength and autonomy. People whose psychopathology centered in problematically self development, a condition that all these authors equated with difficulties in the first two years of life, could work out their problems if provided with an analytic situation that allowed them to reengage those phases with the analyst experienced as the archaic maternal environment of that era. Some of these analysts believed, like Melaine Klein, that these very early situations involved inherent conflicts that now be resolved through interpretation in analysis. Others like Donald Winnicott held that new experiences, "beyond interpretation," with a good-enough object were needed so that the developmental failure could be righted through new development. The theoretical formulations of many of these authors was either so inherently fantastic, or so abstruse, or so unsystematic that their work has had relatively little influence on psychoanalytic theory beyond the range of their immediate followers. It is only now being integrated into the mainstream of psychoanalytic thought. Margaret Mahler and her coworkers also concerned themselves with he early development of the self. They centered their attention on the era of late toddlerhood that involved the difficulties of the child emerging from a state they called "symbiosis" in which the experience of the self includes the care taking environment into a state of being an individual in one's own right. Based on treatment experiences with youngsters and adults who seemed to have difficulties in the area of the self experience and observations of toddlers, which unfortunately were dominated by their preexisting theory, Mahler and her group concluded that much of the difficulty in self experience arose from a failure to adequately separate from the mother of infancy. Although there are many well informed analysts who would disagree with me, I will assert that the overwhelming data of infant and later developmental studies demonstrate that Mahler's symbiotic phase is not part of normal development nor is separateness, in the sense she meant it, characteristic of ordinary or healthy more mature psychological function. However the clinical observations that lead to Mahler's thinking and that have been explained in terms of her theories are certainly common. That is, there are many people who seem to have shaky experiences of themselves and function with a conflicting notions that on the one hand they desperately need other people if they are to function at all reasonably and that some core aspect of themselves is in danger precisely in these urgently needed interactions. Starting in the sixties in Chicago Heinz Kohut initiated a psychoanalytic study of disorders of the self. His approach to these researches was methodologically distinct and is worth a moment's pause. First he took a radical position, that he claimed, incorrectly at the time, to be a standard one, that psychoanalytic data was collected in a manner different from that of the natural sciences. He asserted that it is possible and usually to immediately comprehend complex psychological configurations in others and that such understanding ordinary mode of operation of the working analyst. Empathy for other's internal states, as a mode of comprehension, was, for Kohut, similar to the way we perceive faces - as a complete and immediate gestalt. Analytic training and technique are designed to maximize the analyst's ability to use this investigative tool and to overcoming its pitfalls, just a training in microscopy enables us to vastly extend ordinary visual capacities. While Kohut claimed to be making explicit what everyone did anyway, his position, right or wrong, was deeply antithetical to Freud's view of psychoanalysis as a natural science-like investigation and also Hartman's explicit statements that empathy in the sense that Kohut meant it had no appropriate role in psychoanalytic investigation. A second, and less problematically, position about psychoanalytic investigative method was Kohut's position on transference. In his early writings on self psychology Kohut assumed that the only data to be taken seriously in psychoanalysis were the data of the transference. The various stories the patient told, the analyst's conceptual framework and responses and all the other stuff the analyst commonly use to frame a picture of the patient's psychology was of minimal importance compared to the job of describing and understanding the interaction between patient and analyst. Kohut also believed that premature interpretations to the effect that the patient was avoiding knowing something about himself often interfered with the full blossoming of the transference. According to Kohut, premature interpretations, particularly premature interpretations of defense often resulted in the analyst discovering evidence that confirmed their preexisting notions because they misunderstood possibly contrary clinical facts as representative of the patients' avoidance of already known realities. Using empathy and the exploration of transference as their primary tools, Kohut and his students treated a group of patients whose distress took three overlapping forms. One group of patients suffered from feelings of depletion, emptiness, triviality and/or fragmentation. These experiences often took symbolic expression in the form of hypochondriasis. Another set of patients were engaged in activities that seemed enormously driven or addictive such as sexual promiscuity and perversion, shop lifting, desperately clinging relations to other people and substance abuse. Finally, some of the patients had chronic and acute states of tantrum like rage. In analysis, at least as conducted by Kohut and his followers, these patients developed characteristic attitudes to the analyst that Kohut labeled selfobject transferences. Characteristically, often against considerable internal resistance, these patients came to experience the analyst as essential to their well being. His physical or psychological absence variously precipitated great distress and/or the reemergence of symptoms that had been previously remitted. For example, a young man who had entered analysis much distressed by his promiscuous homosexual behavior reported what for him was a major business success during a session. The analyst, noting that the patient's anxiety had interfered with an even greater accomplishment, made the plausible interpretation that the patient had inhibited himself from doing even better because he experienced his business competitor as like the analyst and feared the analyst's reprisal if the patient beat him in competition. The interpretation was bolstered by several significant details that made it plausible and the patient thought it was "right on the mark" and promised "to try to do better next time." Retrospectively he said he had felt irritable and "headachy" during and immediately after the interpretation was given. That evening he returned to a gay pornographic movie theatre were there was much sexual activity among the patrons. Before the analysis this was one of his regular haunts but he had stopped patronizing the theatre many months before. The patient allowed several men to perform fellatio on him. He felt angry and painfully excited as he thought the fallators really appreciated what he had. In response to what he felt was the analysts inadequately appreciative response the patient had desperately turned to a more concrete indication that someone could appreciate his accomplishments. Another patient experienced every weekend as "like being sent away to live in the Sahara in a desert" and the return to the analysis as "like coming back to the oasis." When their feelings are not interrupted these patients like these experience the analyst in characteristic ways that Kohut described with oversimplifying systemticity. Some patients idealized the analyst seeing in him the embodiment of strength and good and feeling alive and whole in his presence. Others find relief in the sense of being in a unity with their analyst, or being like him or being appreciated by him. Interruptions in these states of mind commonly bring with them inordinate distress or symptoms which could be reasonably understood as experiences of a fragmented or devitalized self or attempts to avoid those experiences. From these clinical experiences Kohut posited that there were a group of people for whom the maintenance of a satisfactory self experience was centrally important because it was so problematic. The analyses of these patients was characterized by the use of the analyst to maintain the a cohesive and vital self by using the image of the analyst as part of the self or as a support for the self. Any interruption in the capacity to use the analyst in this manner lead to the reemergence of problems in this area. The situation within the analysis was equated with postulated normal developmental states in which the caretaker ordinarily performs the functions for the self. These functions Kohut called selfobject functions and he believed his patients to be suffering from disorders of the self resultant on traumatic failures of early selfobject functions. As in normal development small, empathically supported, failures in the selfobject function allow patients to identify with the image of the way the analyst should have functioned and to make those functions more their own. However mental health does not consist in giving up self objects. Kohut asserted that selfobject functions normally continue across the course of life and that it is their qualities, not their existence, that is altered with maturity. (Having made this assertion Kohut never elaborated or demonstrated it. Recently Bertram Cohler and myself have undertaken the task of exploring the empirical evidence for Kohut's position.) Kohut's findings, and the findings of many of those who have examined the psychology of the self from other viewpoints, have been questioned in too apparently distinct ways, whose interconnection I will show you in a moment. The first objection is that Kohut's theories serve to avoid painful psychological truths. Many of the phenomena Kohut observed had been observed previously and classified as defensive operations. For example, idealizations of the analyst were commonly understood as ways both to avoid knowing of the unconscious demeaning of the analyst and to arrange for disappointments when the analyst fails to live up to the idealization as he inevitably must. The idea that the patient "needs" the analyst to function in some certain fashion lest his core being be seriously damaged could be understood as a fantasied misunderstanding designed to rationalize wishes whose non-fulfillment may be extremely frustrating but not inherently, must less psychologically fatally, damaging. The second set of objections has to do with the theory of the self. Kohut never clearly defines his central concept of the self. Essentially he says that everyone knows from experience what the self is and leaves it at that. After studying the many discussions of the meaning of the "self" in the psychoanalytic literature one is reminded of the Buddha's comments on the self. He said that those who believe in the self are like "a man who says that he is in love with the most beautiful woman in the land, but is unable to specify her name, her family or her appearance" (Digha Nikaya I 193, quoted in Carrithers (1983).) The essential theoretical difficulty was clarified by Meissner who pointed out that the term self as habitually used by Kohut and most other writers whose work places the self at the center of psychological life, is consistently used to refer to both a psychological representation and also a psychological agent. Although more systematic researchers, for example Hartman, limit the concept of self to a psychological representation of the person, they also give the self a markedly subsidiary role in psychology. Meissner's argument is quite similar to Schafer's later discussions of internalization in which Schafer observed that the elaborate analytic theories of internalization were in fact nothing more then the translation into psychoanalytic jargon of unconscious fantasies and did not, in his view represent, represent actual psychological mechanism and in fact obscured, what actually happens when we have experience that had been described as the taking in of another person or aspects of that person. The two problems with self psychology, its use as a defense against painful insight and its confusion of agent and image, are related. Notice that if the self is "only" a psychological representation it would follow that the patient's idea that had will be dysfunctional as a direct result of some impairment in this representation seems mistaken - or at least so it seemed to many thoughtful psychoanalysts. Only the impairment of some mental agency could really result in dysfunction. It was if the patient complained that his car did not function because part of a picture of the vehicle had been obliterated. The idea that the patient is in error in this regard supports the clinical stance that the patient's fears in these matters are not an accurate assessment of the situation but rather fantasies motivated by their unconscious desires to hide deeper psychological realities. Now of course we all know that there are "mere" representations that are very good for actually doing things and whose faultiness causes no end of problems. These representations are called programs. Now, I suspect that once stated the notion that the self is a program which like other programs is capable of change by altering its representation and at the same time is an active agent is neither a surprising or remarkable idea. However, when one notices that fifty years or so of both clinical and theoretic psychoanalytic thinking about the self has been profoundly influenced by the idea that the existence of such an object is a logical impossibility the point seems more worth making. The other advantage of making this point is that it invites us to use what we know about programs to think about the self and suggests the systematic characterization of the self as a program. Let us begin the selfobject function whose enemies are want to equate it with some form of mysticism. We know, of course, that programs have meaning and function only within computational environments. An inappropriate computational environment can alter the meaning and operation of the program or render it altogether meaningless. For example a routine that calls a global variable gives a different value depending on the value of that variable; a program written in C for which one has no compiler is totally useless. The use of the term "computation environment" in computer science is relative to the process being discussed and only has meaning once one specifies what program is being referred to. An expression only has meaning within an environment. Having bound a global variable that value then becomes part of the computational environment of the programs running within that context. Of course from a different viewpoint the program that sets up the environment for our first program itself has an environment. Thus ordinarily we expect that program will "need" appropriate environments in the same way that self psychology predicts that people need selfobjects. What one chooses to call program and what environment obviously effects the picture of the situation that emerges and is a function of the interest of the investigator. Similarly the boundaries of the self depend on the point of view we adopt based on the focus of our interests. It is only important to notice that the choice is ours, not intrinsic to the system under study and that it is important not to become confused about the principles governing the entities we have defined. A few decades ago von Bertalanfy made a minor industry of pointing out the inappropriate application of conservation principles to "open" systems that were mistakenly treated as having no energy flux across their boundaries. The mechanics of the selfobject or the environment is naturally important but by no means definitive in terms of its function. In one since it is obviously of considerable importance whether a subroutine that is called is available in RAM, is currently located on a easily accessed storage device or is located on a tape that the machines operator must fetch and mount before it can be used. In another sense these mechanical considerations are of minor importance in our understanding of the program. Likewise whether the capacity to be soothed is a readily available group of psychological functions represented within the cranium, the activity of a caretaker who is but a cry away or requires some elaborate undertaking - say a few years of psychoanalysis - can be regarded as involving no essential difference in this function. Although he never would have put it in this way this is an essential aspect of what Kohut was trying to point to in the idea of the selfobject - something that functions as an essential aspect of the self or of the support of the self but which because of the mechanics of its availability is at times less efficiently accessible than other aspects of the self that we are more accustomed to including in our idea of the self. This computational relative inaccessablity commonly is associated with the need for particular perceptual inputs and computational assistance. For instance the phenomenon of "social referencing" has been studied extensively from a social psychological point of view. Starting at about age seven months given a novel situation or a situation with elements that suggest danger babies look to caregivers for cues about whether to proceed and base their actions on the caretaker's response. Toddlers as they move away from mother in a play ground frequently turn around, checking mother's expression before proceeding further. In the toddlers experience the decision does not take its basis in the issue of whether mother, as a person approves or disapproves of the action, rather the mother's approving response registers as an impersonal "It is okay." The toddler has not called the person "mother" in this situation but has rather expanding his computational resources which happen at the moment to be located in the being we would refer to as his mother. The child needs loves nor hates the mother in this context but does need her to function. If she is functioning well like any computational resource he remains unaware of her presence. It is only her failure of availability that makes her of interest, just as we are generally unaware of our memories except when we have difficulty recollecting something we need to continue our thinking. Those of you familiar with Marvin Minsky's work recently summarized in The Society of Mind will recognize in these ideas a particular application of the multi-hierarchy computational model that can be used to explore processing within many levels of human function from neurons to societal organizations. The issue of a non-pejorative attitude to what we call mysticism comes to mind here. Much of what is referred to as mystical might well be considered as attempts to comprehend hierarchically higher computational structures within the computational world of lower order entities. The self as a program does two important things that are the subject of our constant attention in our analytic work. The program monitors its own operation and ordinarily modifies itself in response to such monitoring. The type of programs we are familiar with in daily work with computers generally have facilities to monitor and modify their own execution to a limited extent. Error trapping of one type or other is virtually universally employed so that unexpected or undesirable situations do not result in the continuation of "business as usual" but instead lead to some kind of branching in the process. In an "error" situation the new execution often takes the form of enlarging the computational environment to include the operator who is asked how to proceed or to correct some situation that impedes the computation or to authorize the use of additional computational resources. For example if the execution of a program requires more than a certain amount of time the systems operator may be asked whether to continue or abort the execution. Similarly, but much more extensively, the self is engaged in a constant process of monitoring its own function and functional needs, arranging for them to be met or attempting to compensate for their not being met. We have already implicitly discussed the ongoing monitoring of computational resources and the recognition of the need to evoke devices such as the perception of other people to serve as selfobjects. The detailed study of the nature, functions and situations in which these additional computational devices are called or where calls to such devices is avoided constitutes a major area of psychoanalytic investigation that encompasses much of object relations theory, including self psychology, attachment theory, the concept of the transitional object and the role of cultural experience. In the von Neumann architecture computer design was dominated by the wish to avoid programming errors. This was accomplished by carefully separating data, programs and processing functions and forcing sequential processing so that except in terms of the overall duration of computation the outcome of a computation was unaffected by the time required for each computational step. Furthermore building this basic architecture requires the anticipation at least the basic architecture of the system from its beginning. It cannot result of the evolutionary piecing together of elements designed for other functions as the brain must have evolved. The von Neuman architecture is so excellent an environment for humans to design programs for that it dominated computer design for almost four decades. However as von Neumann noted from early on this architecture is a poor model for brain functioning. The microsecond firing times of neurons are much to slow to allow brains to do the things they do all the time with a von Neumann machines. Furthermore brains are the result of a bioevolutionary process, not a unitary design and its programmer is not an individual who sets out to explicitly specify processes but an environment with many other things on its mind than programming brains. Of course we know from direct study of brains that they operate through massively parallel processing. Fortunately for those of us interested in brains and their productions it has become clear that the technological limitations inherent in the von Neumann architecture make it essential that other architectures be explored in depth to make more capable computers. The last five years has seen an explosion of publications about parallel processing architecture and we will be among the beneficiaries of the resultant intellectual advances. But, of course, the problems that von Neumann sought to avoid in computer design are precisely the problems that emerge in parallel processing. It is simply much more difficult to predict what is going to happen when things do not go on sequentially, when the distinction between memory and processing is abandoned and simple hierarchies of bindings are abandoned. Now rather then building the absence of these difficulties into the architecture of the system it becomes necessary to discover ways to overcome them. A much more elaborate system of error trapping and control becomes essential. Parallel systems are highly vulnerable to internal conflicts and instabilities. Attempts to remove these features from the system usually entail the loss of precisely what has been gained through parallelism. To give an very elementary but quite everyday example, when a database can be updated through several different inputs there is considerable danger that attempting simultaneous updating of a record will result in loss of data or undesirable results. Suppose I am making a deposit in my savings account at the same time that interest is being calculated and recorded in the same record. In many database systems the entire record is retrieved updated and stored again. So in this instance the original record is retrieved by both the deposit and the interest function. Each, independently updates the record and then writes it to the storage device. Either the deposit or the interest payment, whichever is stored last, will be recorded but not both. A simple solution that is used in many database systems is to make the record available to only one potential input at a time by locking it to other users while it is in the hands of a potential inputter. In essence one suspends parallel processing and goes to sequential processing in the face of such potential errors. This is an awful solution for simple database management, although as anyone who has worked with such a system knows it can be thoroughly annoying. But such a general solution for a massively parallel system would slow the whole thing to a snails pace. Thus special mechanism for recognizing, protecting against and resolving conflicts are expected to be a central aspect of massively parallel system. But notice how close we have gotten to the ordinary stuff of psychoanalytic clinical work. A lot of what we do in analysis has to do with successes and failures to resolve conflicts between computational results achieved through parallel processing of situations. To give a much oversimplified instance, a young man who might displace a supervisor by putting forward his own ideas expresses them but muddles their presentation. Analysis reveals that his actions result from two parallel, conflicting computations and an attempt to resolve that conflict. On the one hand are a variety of factors including his wish for greater prestige and material wealth that in turn reflect a long sequence of developmental processes and on the other his assumption (which is outside of awareness) that he will be harmed in various ways if he pursues these wishes results in a state of conflict. This conflict and potential conflicts are dealt with variously by some higher order resolutions or through the isolation of the processes from one another by a variety of means. The resulting action, unfortunately called a "compromise formation" in psychoanalytic jargon is an attempt to synthesize the results of these two groups of computations. An even greater danger to the system than partially contradictory computational results is its own instability. Computational process may become chaotic, disorganized or pass through a catastrophe as we recognize in depth when we study them in terms of dynamical systems. It is reasonable to expect that a computational system can only function in anything like a satisfactory manner if such situations is rigorously limited to lower levels of function and if the system has extensive safeguards against higher level catastrophes or chaos. Again this is precisely what we find clinically. The most central concerns in disorders of the self frequently are concerns about discontinuous and disorderly change. A typical error trapping procedure in the area where catastrophic change seems a danger is to avoid all change whatsoever and to attempt to isolate the computational processes from outside influences that might result in change. Recently I described how the process of working through in psychoanalysis, the repeated reexamination if slightly different versions of paradigmatic situations within an analysis, could usefully be regarded as the reestablishment of a Boltzman algorithm-like psychological function by which existing "solutions" are repeatedly and automatically reexamined both to achieve greater optimality and to integrate data that may have been unavailable at the time they were formed. I said that much psychopathology could be usefully characterized as the interruption of this ordinary process in the face of a perceived threat of disruption or disorganization and that what we often think of as the curative factor of working through is just the resumption of normal psychological function. This brings us to the third way in which the self differs from the programs we are most familiar with from the study of computers. The self is self developing. Here my opinions are somewhat different from many of my psychoanalytic colleagues, so let me spell them out briefly. As she attempted to explore the concepts of normality and pathology in childhood, Anna Freud discovered that the presence or absence of symptoms per se was not an adequate guide in assessing children. She concluded that childhood was normatively a period of change and development and these were its primary tasks. The failure of such for such development to be ongoing was the essence of psychological disturbance in childhood. For Anna Freud, who had a clear picture of what psychological health was like in adulthood, the task of childhood was move toward such mature functioning and she posited a drive to "the completion of development." Three groups of observation impressed me into extending her notion. First the past quarter century has yielded a massive demonstration that human development normal continues across the entire life course - that the idea of a definite mature developmental state whether occurring with the resolution of the Oedipus complex or the end of late adolescence or whenever else is mistaken. Second there seem to be quite diverse ways to be psychologically healthy which becomes readily apparent if we avoid employing a priori notions of the meaning of health. Finally the work begun by Marsh to the effect that programs can be written not with specific goals in mind but rather that proceed to explore and develop in area that are vaguely defined by such criteria as "interestingness" corresponded so well to the observations of workers like Piaget who found that exploration and development were self motivating that it seemed likely that the human mind is such a system. It thus seems reasonable to posit that an ongoing function of the self is its own reorganization and development. Indeed it was this point that first led to my interest in a computation model of the self because the question of how the self could be both agent and representation and in particular how it could be an agent acting on itself as a representation has a long standing concrete instaniation in Lisp. Lisp, one of the two oldest high level programming languages in common use, was specifically designed to manipulate list of symbols. Of course lisp programs are themselves list of symbols so that lisp programs can be operated on my lisp programs including the program itself. The species that seemed so internally contradictory that analysts denied there existence have in fact been around for a long time. Now, of course such programs are not without very serious problems - in particular they too can be much less stable and far less predictable than those programs were program and data are kept strictly separate. As with parallel processing one way to protect from the dangers inherent in such a structure is to carefully limit in advance the changes the program can make in itself. Another possibility is to monitor the development of the program and introduce error trapping and correction as untoward consequences of the rewriting occur. A combination of the two approaches would seem to be necessary. In a sequential system for example a fatal error occurs if a real interminable loop is introduced into a program. Here, however, parallelism and conflict can be of considerable help. Freud's idea of a tripartite model of mind essentially involves the parallel processing of data, the consequent development and resolution of conflict so that a variety of needs can be met through these various modes of processing. In particular aspects of the mind can monitor the ongoing process of the development of the self - interrupting and altering it when it comes parlously close to instability or stagnation. The hierarchical level at which these process can proceed are various and new levels in the hierarchy seem to develop with greater maturity. In particular greater capacities for abstraction both from data and process appear to be a normal part of human development. With these capacity comes increased abilities for metacognition. Piaget's observation of the progressive decentering of cognition with the related capacity, for example to think about thinking, represents such an elaboration of abstraction hierarchies. Among the many objections that could be raised to my discussion is the importance I lay on introspection and subjectivity as a source of information about psychological processes. From a computational viewpoint consciousness is an odd, unnecessary, or at least peculiar phenomenon, while from the point of view of classical psychoanalysis precisely what is most interesting about people is barred from the conscious awareness. Thus subjective reports about experience should be relatively uninteresting to both groups. However, following Vygotsky and Basch, I take a different point of view about consciousness. Consciousness is a state that we employ when automatic functioning becomes problematic. For example we only become aware of walking when we stumble or when we are learning how to do it and only attend to it in detail if something impedes are ability to walk. It is thus precisely in areas of difficulty that we expect awareness to appear. So it is the areas of difficulty that we should find well represented in consciousness. Freud's idea of bringing the unconscious into awareness then is nothing more then the extension of this normal process into areas in which it is not employed. In particular the mechanism of repression reflects a special procedure to keep ideas separate from each other by not bringing them into awareness. But more generally we can use subjective experience as at least a preliminary guide to the computational difficulty. I am well aware of having painted the picture of the computational self with extremely broad strokes and having done violence to many subtle and important issues in the process. At the same time I am impressed that psychoanalysts having discovered that the Freudian and ego-psychological paradigms are inadequate have largely abandoned the attempt to develop broad theories that encompass the particular data of the psychoanalytic field, choosing instead to focus on smaller more tractable problems and maintaining an unavowed theoretical agnosticism. An exception to this abandonment of theory lies in the work of the self psychologists. However their conceptualizations, especially those of Kohut, while evocative remain vague. I think it is clear that the computational properties of the mind must find representation in personal psychology. I have suggested one possibility for how this may occur using the computational self as the central organizer for my thinking and attempting to show how ideas from computer science may yield models that are congruent with our clinical experience. Just as I believe development is the central activity of the self so to I believe development should be the central goal of our intellectual activities. Thus if this paper, despite its flaws does nothing more then stimulate some of you to think along these lines and to help me do so more cogently I will be satisfied.