ABSTRACT
A simple example of such conflict is to be seen when something arouses in an animal two instinctive impulses which normally lead to responses of an opposite kind; the one, such as curiosity or the desire for food, prompting it to approach, while fear at the same time prompts it to shrink away. Of all the methods of dealing with conflict, some attempt at repression is probably the commonest, seeming, as it does, to be the most obvious way of meeting the difficulty; but so real are the dangers, and so far-reaching the consequences that may result from it, that there is now a tendency, since this was made plain, to regard repression of every kind as unwise, and to suppose that, in the interests of mental sanity. Complex wholes of perception and of feeling are composed of unlike and often of contradictory elements which yet are reconciled with one another in a greater synthesis.
