ABSTRACT
Competent anxiety control depends on an ability to use good rather than bad defences. In other words, mental competence is increased when the person uses more, rather than less valid semantic concepts stored in the neocortex to make decisions. With development of the neocortex, semantic concepts work to make decisions that can inhibit or promote overt enactment of instinctual tendencies. People with functional mental illnesses resemble infants, animals, and autists in that their ability to make and use semantic concepts is small relative to normal adult humans. Immaturity and mental illness predispose the person to interpret sensations, concepts, and feelings emerging from the unconscious or the social world as emergencies. Interpreting reality with valid concepts promotes good decisions to cope with stressful conflict. Human infants have a large, essentially concept-free neocortex, and non-human, adult mammals have a neocortex too small to contain many concepts.
