ABSTRACT
There are several reasons why frames, rules, and boundaries are critical factors in emotional adaptation and why this aspect of human life is the prime concern of the deep unconscious system of the emotion-processing mind. As noted, frames in the form of rules and boundaries play a crucial role in the functioning of individual organisms, their subsystems, and their interactions with their environments. As such, they are the guarantors of order and lawfulness, and the foundation on which disorder and inventiveness, and evolution itself, are based. Without rules and boundaries there is anarchy, utter disorder, and eventual annihilation. All organisms survive through in-built and learned regularities and by virtue of some degree of physical and social organization, however crude. Many birds and vertebrates are territorial, with clear and generally respected boundaries that demark their living and breeding spaces. Within these confines, they are spared attack and threat from conspecifics and, in some cases, from predators from other species.
