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Norbert Wiener, who is Professor of Mathematics in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discusses in this presentation mental disease as a breakdown of organization. He begins by describing briefly some of the pathology and physiology of homeostasis, which he designates as vicious and virtuous circles. He considers the pathology in the functional disorders a result of some breakdown in the system as a whole rather than in one localizable element. There is either too little equipment to handle the stimuli or the demand on the available equipment is too great. Another possible explanation for the breakdown is in a disturbance of the 'servo-mechanism': the feedback leads to a condition of uncontrollable oscillation instead of stabilization. Wiener believes that there are three general methods of attempting to repair the broken down organization: 1, to use the psychiatrist and his judgment as a homeostat attacking each departure from the norm; 2, to put the patient into an environmental situation which itself is more or less automatically homeostatic; 3, the most difficult but the most hopeful, to try to locate the particular links in the homeostatic chain that have become ineffective and to find a way to bolster them or replace them.