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The author is dissatisfied with present-day psychiatric nosologies and the looseness of the concept of defense. Psychology, including clinical psychiatric observations and psychoanalytic hypotheses, should find a place in a general system of behavior. Application of the concept of homeostasis to psychology has been too limited, and the factors of growth and progressive differentiation of the organism must be represented. The theoretical biologist von Bertalanffy arrived at concepts similar to those considered by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but with important differences. In living 'open' systems, a 'steady state' prevails. Supplies of energy are imported and the process of entropy (disintegration of the system) that operates in inorganic 'closed' systems is counteracted. Biological forces—growth, reproduction, senescence—continuously threaten the homeostatic balance. 'Irritability and autonomous activities are smaller waves of process superimposed on the continuous flux of the system, irritability consisting in reversible disturbances after which the system comes back to its steady state, and autonomous activities consisting in periodic fluctuations.' Menninger contends that the concept of the 'steady state' should not be confined to the biochemical adjustment of the organism, but should include all psychological phenomena. It is pragmatically justifiable to think of tendencies of disintegration as force in a negative direction. The 'ego' is an organized functional part of the mental apparatus governed by 'cybernetic feedbacks' and 'servomechanisms'. Manifestations of the life instinct and the death instinct must be mediated by the ego, which constitutes a cybernetic mechanism. 'The ego is thus a crystallized representative of the life instinct as well as its regulator', striving for maintenance of an optimal physio-psycho-sociological balance. Physical and psychic pain are warning signals. If such signals are not heeded and imbalance conti