General System Theory

It is a symptom of mental disease that spontaneity is impaired. The patient increasingly becomes an automaton or S-R machine, is pushed by biological drives, obsessed by needs for food, elimination, sex gratification, and so on. The model of the passive organism is a quite adequate description of the stereotype behavior of compulsives, of patients with brain lesions, and of the waning of autonomous activity in catatonia and related psychopathology. But by the same token, this emphasizes that normal behavior is different.