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This paper is of some interest to the analyst. The several disciplines represented at the Mental Health Research Institute of The University of Michigan have tried to arrive at a mutually acceptable set of operational propositions regarding general behavior theory. These disciplines include psychiatry, anthropology, medicine, mathematical biology, social sciences, and history. The workers attempt to define, in neutral terms acceptable to all and expressive of the concepts of each, the laws operative in all living systems, extending roughly from viruses through societies. They consider all behavior as an exchange of energy within an open system, or from one such system to another. Any exchange of energy across a boundary results in some alteration or distortion of the form of the energy. Each system has its environment in which it functions, and subsystems within it for which it is the environment. All living systems tend to maintain in steady state many variables by means of negative feedback mechanisms that distribute information to their subsystems which keep these in orderly balance; they thus also affect the equilibrium between the system and its environment. There is a range of stability for the system within its environment, dependent upon the capacities for correction inherent in the equilibratory capacities of the subsystems.
The author reports numerous specific propositions to be derived from this general theory, and summarizes several. Two of these seem to have particular relevance for ego psychology: 'living systems respond to continuously increasing stress first by a lag in response, then by an overcompensatory response, and finally by catastrophic collapse of the system'; and 'systems which survive employ the least expensive defense against stress and increasingly more expensive ones later'. A large part of the paper is devoted to the description of empirical researches designed to test, on widely different behavioral systems, these several pr