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rational and conceptual thinking; and the second is the relative unification of his mental processes as against the much more rigid compartmentalisation of animal mind and behaviour. Animal behaviour is essentially irrational and arbitrary due to the rigidity of their instincts. Human behaviour, on the other hand, being relatively free from arbitrary canalisation of instincts, is likely to show more rationality instead of irrationality. Abandonment of rigidity of instincts and the provisions of association-mechanism by which any activity or mood, whether in the spheres of knowing, feeling or willing, can be brought into relation with any other, brings about a unified mental life for man.
Psychological Conflicts Produce Distortions
Ironically, the unification of mental processes is not a pure and simple blessing for man. Defects in the form of emotional conflicts and tensions are inevitably mixed up with the advantages conferred by the mental unity. Psychological conflicts are produced by two dominating but opposing impulses simultaneously demanding appropriate action. The result may be sheer inaction or mental tension. Other animals can easily arrange a single urge at a time to take command over its machinery of action and escape mental tension. Such an easy way out, however, is not available to man due to the existence of the hidden unconscious component in the human mind. Thus man is perhaps the only organism normally and inevitably subject to harmful neurois.
The psychological warfare between two dominating but opposing urges is thus not only inconvenient, but can more often than not, be dangerous too. Mechanism for minimising conflict is called repression by psychologists. It implies forcible banishment of one of the two opposing impulses to the realm of conscious mind, and the very process of banishment is itself unconscious. From the darkness of the subconscious, the frustrated but self-assertive impulse may persist in the form of crude urges to violent aggression and cruelty which is all the more dangerous for not being consciously recognised.
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