Question about what BFD can access

[Chris Ross <cross+gnu at distal dot com>]

  There is a lot of documentation on what BFD can do, and how to do it.
My question is this: Can a program linked with BFD analyze itself at
runtime?  gdb seems to be able to at least get the symbol table out
of an application that you "attach" to, without being pointed at a  
binary.
But, as I'm doing it on the same system, I'm not 100% sure it's not just
magically finding the executable file somehow.

  I've written code before to pull the symbol table, and addresses of
functions, out of an ELF object on disk.  However, I currently want
to try to get the start address of functions out of the symbol table
at runtime.  Can a BFD object be created from a program in memory,
rather than from a file on disk?

  Thanks.  Any pointers would be appriciated.

                                - Chris