The psychoanalytic office is a crucible for a rich spectrum of emotions. But perhaps none of them manifests itself so insistently as anger, and does not appear in so many guises. For example, a woman finds her apparently inexplicable rage towards her partner, manifested in asthmatic attacks, so strong that she becomes afraid to be in the same room with him. In the first weeks of psychotherapy, a man expresses his rage at professional betrayal by withholding from me almost all the necessary information about himself. Again, the person with the respiratory disease is so angry at the doctors controlling his behavior and at my supposed complicity in the finger-waving that he smokes heavily in supposed retaliation. The morning after Donald Trump is elected President of the United States, a woman begins to cry furiously as soon as she sits down.
The psychoanalytic office turns out to be a suitable place to observe the essential paradox associated with anger. As almost anyone can attest, sheer anger is by nature felt and received with intense immediacy, bringing to life the bodily and emotional resonances of the word "feelings." And at the same time, he is especially slippery, prone to hiding and pretending, disguising himself in countless other ways - in secrecy, nervousness, politeness or excessive friendliness. If anger does not make itself felt openly and immediately, then it lurks somewhere nearby, hiding under the cover of some other, less noticeable emotional state, biding its time and waiting to be released.
There is always anger in clinical discussions with my colleagues. Often it is imposed simply by force; patients complain, criticize and curse their loved ones, their colleagues, the guy on the bus, bad pop songs, overpriced grocery stores, sometimes overtly and almost always implicitly inserting the analyst himself into their range of targets. In other cases, the anger comes in more subtly, perhaps without conscious awareness by the patient, who may protest (angrily) at the suggestion that this is how he feels. Anger is everywhere and nowhere in clinical work, overwhelmingly present and ominously absent. But her notoriety in collegiate discussions has never been matched by conceptual interest. We tend to think of anger as part of the content, one emotional state among others.
So why, then, sitting in a counseling room, let alone reading and watching the news, is it difficult to shake off the feeling that anger is more than a color on the emotional spectrum? Why does it manifest itself as a force that moves the world, directing the unpredictable flows of private and public life? Both in Sigmund Freud's case histories and in theoretical articles and cultural commentary, anger figures as one of the great driving forces of the individual and the world. The Oedipus complex, for example, the cornerstone of his theory of mental development, is based on the formative power of murderous rage. Although Freud nowhere offers a discrete and holistic conceptual treatment of anger, he hints at the structural place of anger in mental life, in particular in a very brief clinical vignette from the founding text of psychoanalysis, The Preliminary Message (1893), written by his senior colleague, the therapist Josef Breuer, who outlined the couple's therapeutic innovations in the treatment of hysteria.
A man consults with a young doctor at his newly established neuroscience clinic. He suffers from spontaneous hysterical attacks, during which he falls into a frenzy of wordless rage. Under hypnosis, he reveals that he "experienced a scene in which his employer insulted him on the street and hit him with a stick." Returning a few days later, the patient talks about the second attack, which, under hypnosis, is revealed as a dramatization of the event that provoked his illness: "the scene in court when he did not receive satisfaction for his ill-treatment." Freud and Breuer tell us almost nothing about this man. He may be a factory worker or a waiter, but I always picture him as an emerging standard type: the stingy, preoccupied clerk who would soon be immortalized in Joseph K. Franz Kafka or E. M. Forster's Leonard Bast, men behind whose façade of apology lurks quietly raging anger and resentment.
Such iconic fictional characters fit the classic neurotic profile that Freud began to consider and write about. A phenomenon of the rapidly urbanizing, industrializing society of the late 19th century, neurasthenia was the result of a sudden and excessive load of sensory and emotional stimuli pressing on the mind and body, causing symptoms of irritability, fatigue, and depression, as well as headaches and headaches. jumps in blood pressure. The employee's silent pantomimic fury suggests a traumatized and overwhelmed nervous system unable to bear the brunt of the humiliation of the public hut.
denial and subsequent public denial of a legal claim for compensation.
The cry of a child communicates the gap between a need and its satisfaction.
Freud's clinical interest in nervous disorders of the time was accompanied by more fundamental research into mental life, equally relevant to the case of the battered office worker. In an unpublished 1895 text known as "The Project for a Scientific Psychology", Freud reflects on the child's earliest experience of gratification, describing the state of being surrounded by excess internal tension caused by hunger or some other vital need. Unable to provide for this on their own, the child cries, communicating their grief and thereby attracting the attention of their caregiver. The full cycle of tension, external intervention and relief constitutes the "experience of satisfaction."'. The effectiveness of the infant's hungry cry leads Freud to the startling conclusion that "man's primordial helplessness is the primary source of all moral motives." Morality, that is, begins in the plight of a being who calls on his guardians to give satisfaction that he cannot provide for himself. While they don't, she shouts out her angry proto-moral protest.
Under the hypnosis of the beaten worker, the same helpless cry emerged, this time without a sound, as he "couldn't get satisfaction for the abuse." Verbal echo is more than a coincidence. The humiliating inability to receive satisfaction brings the worker closer to his original infantile helplessness. His reaction, like that of a baby, is a wordless cry of rage, driven now into the silence of unconscious memory.
Hysteria, neurasthenia, infantile need: these very different mental phenomena are based on the same experience of helplessness. The cry of a child heralds a gap between the need and its satisfaction, which becomes more and more difficult to endure the longer it lasts. Usually our physical and emotional development moves us away from this state of helplessness; as we develop in mental and bodily autonomy, we can increasingly help ourselves, seek and find the food or love we crave. But, as the case of the co-worker reminds us, experiencing traumatic shock or humiliation can resurrect in us the desperate vulnerability of an infant. And, as my psychoanalytic practice reminds me every day, even much more ordinary experiences—real or imagined insults, disrespect, rejections, disappointments, disappointments—can bring us into contact with this primary layer of helplessness. Most often, we cope with this feeling of helplessness through that state of agitated innervation that we call anger.
And as soon as we are born, we are placed in the care of adults on whom our survival and our physical, cognitive and emotional development depend, and who thereby inevitably attract our changing and mixed love and hate. From a psychoanalytic point of view, anger cannot be separated from these earliest affective experiences.
These experiences lead us to one of the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, namely, attraction. But what is a drive? Freud's most complete exposition on this subject can be found in his article "Motives and their vicissitudes" (1915). His first point of view is that drive is a source of stimulus within the organism rather than outside it. The fundamental difference is that the impact of an external stimulus - say, bright light or loud noise - is always temporary. On the other hand, the stimulus produced by attraction is "always constant". And since it comes from within, there is no escape from it.
We are forever subject to this inner force of attraction. The impulses to love that which satisfies us and to hate that which disappoints us are always intensified, sometimes approaching the surface of consciousness, sometimes imperceptibly disappearing. Since the organism can never get rid of the stimuli emanating from the drives, its first task, which places a significant and constant burden on the nervous system, is to master them.
For Lacan, anger is a consequence of the inability of desire to be realized in reality.
One of Freud's most enigmatic claims about drive, and the source of much comment and controversy, is that it lies "on the borderline between the mental and the somatic." It is the psychic representative of the bodily stimulus—what the itch might look like if it were a mental rather than a skin entity. Freud ascribes four components to drive: pressure, the amount of force the drive exerts on us by making demands on us; the goal which Freud defines in the clear echo of the hungry child of the Project as "satisfaction in all cases"; object, thing necessary to achieve satisfaction (chest, touch, voice); and the source is the somatic place where the attraction originates.
The concepts of purpose and
object make it clear why drive is different from instinct. Instinct is a programmed biological knowledge that ensures the achievement of vital needs, for example, the attraction of a bee to nectar and pollen. Where instinct is concerned, the path between target and object is a short, straight line. In a drive, this path is usually more tortuous and uncertain. Its goal is still satisfaction, but what exactly satisfaction is is more unclear. This is precisely what the controversial French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan alludes to when he says that "the use of the drive function has no other purpose for me than to question what is meant by satisfaction." For example, I may feel hungry, but will a slice or two of stale bread bring the desired satisfaction? It will answer my life's need
And this ambiguity is not a late development of the human being. When a baby cries greedily, does he just want milk? Or is she looking for the more elusive pleasure that can come from the smell and touch of her mother's skin, from the warmth that flows over her lips as milk flows? In short, the goal and object of attraction are subject to infinite variations. Impulses, says Freud, can be "retarded or diverted" from their goal, deviated from the path they started on. Do I want scrambled eggs, or smoked salmon, or obscenely thick peanut butter ointment? Do I love her, or her, or him, or them?
The relationship between target and object is reliably constant in the bee. Only one object serves its purpose. Today, not a single bee felt like trying ginger ale or vodka, just for a change. For a person, such variability determines the drive. In his earlier coherent treatment of attraction, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud notes that persistent romantic myths—for example, that two people are, as we might say, “made for each other”—convince us of that the relationship of sexual attraction to the object is "more intimate than it really is." In reality, "the sex drive and the sex object are just soldered together." The drives are fundamentally mobile, subject to vibrations, displacements, reversals and detours. When they threaten the stability of the body, they can be slowed down or turned against us; For example, feeling hatred for an object that I am meant to love can cause me such fear and guilt that I choose to hate myself instead.
For Lacan, anger is a consequence of the inability of desire to be realized in reality. Referring to the French writer Charles Péguy, he remarks: "It's when the little pegs refuse to go into the little holes." In short, the instincts doom us to at least some degree of dissatisfaction, soldering our desire to objects that we only belatedly realize that we cannot fulfill it. And the main language of this dissatisfaction is anger.
Perhaps it is the unpredictability of anger, its frightening ability to be triggered by disparate, often violently opposed causes, that most worries and confuses us (and, of course, me) about anger. This confusion often leads thinkers to strive for clarity, separating conservative (or "good") forms of anger from destructive (or "bad") ones. We see this kind of movement, for example, in many recent feminist and anti-racist writers and activists who celebrate the power of anger to motivate social change and combat structural forms of injustice and division.
This idea of anger as a positive and life-preserving affect finds some support in the meager psychoanalytic literature on the subject. In a 1949 paper on normal and traumatic birth experiences, British pediatric psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott suggests that a baby's crying after a normal birth is a rudimentary form of self-affirmation: syntonic [i.e. maintaining our inner balance] from a very early age, repressing function with a clear aim to live in your own way, not reactively.”
But when a newborn's vital needs for warmth, nourishment, and love are frustrated by delay or environmental hardship, the effect is far more dystonic. When the scream reaches its target, it helps the child to know what he is angry about. Whereas, if the cry has little or no effect, its purpose gradually becomes less "certain" for the child, leaving him in a state of desperate uncertainty with significant consequences for the person he will become: "the person is always left in some confusion ". about anger and its expression. The key implication of Winnicott's distinction here is that anger promotes growth and helps to define the self when it reaches the required satisfaction, that is, when the needs it expresses are met. But when these needs
remain unanswered, it has the opposite effect, instilling confusion and despair in the heart of the individual.
When the demand for justice is denied, anger can take on a life of its own.
This last form of anger reminds me of Gordon, a man in his 40s whom I watched for six years of intensive psychoanalysis. Gordon was prone to paralyzing headaches and long periods of insomnia that made him feel like he was bursting at the seams. These symptoms have always been most common during periods when romantic relationships become more serious. The prospect of satisfying his longing for love and family was the source of an all-consuming panic that took the form of sudden verbal attacks on his partner for not understanding what he was going through. Insomnia and pain added to his frailty and fragility, perpetuating a dark cycle of rage and apology until the relationship collapsed under strain.
Shortly after his birth, Gordon was raised by nurses and nannies who instituted a strict regimen of bedtime training and scheduled feedings. At the age of seven, he was sent to boarding school, another blow to any desire to, as Winnicott put it, "live your way, not reactively." Gordon's initial protests against the boarding school were met by his parents with assurances that he would enjoy it—after all, they were sent away at his age and grew up to appreciate the experience. Gordon's problem with establishing a lasting relationship was that he could never believe that he would enjoy what Freud calls the "experience of satisfaction" when cries of need are heard and heeded in a timely manner. The more he gave himself into the wrong hands, the more he feared being ignored or abandoned.
Gordon was aware that he was angry, but this anger felt like being possessed by some demon over which he had no control; he had no idea what he was angry at those moments and what he wanted. Unheard anger, left unanswered, can become scattered and uncontrollable, become a master, not a servant of a person.
Perhaps Gordon's predicament speaks to the public anger that has become so palpable in recent years. The protests of the Black Life Movement, MeToo and Extinction Rebellion, and the Trump and Brexit movements, so different in content, have a common complaint that their cries for recognition and response have been ignored for too long.
We want to believe that our anger can be clearly directed and localized—that we can, as Judith Butler put it, “create and cultivate” it. But, as a battered employee reminds us, when the demand for justice is denied, anger can take on a life of its own. We live in a world of multiplying and often conflicting angry demands for recognition. In terrorism, populist authoritarianism, and online hate, we see some consequences of their denial.
Since unmet needs and unmet demands are endemic to life, so is anger. This understanding, central to the approach of Freud and Breuer in Pre-Communication, is also the basis of their therapeutic tool, which they call "abreaction" or catharsis. It is a way to cleanse the repressed anger that builds up in us throughout life. They suggest that certain memories behave like foreign bodies being swallowed; instead of passing through the mental digestive system, they settle in us and remain intact. Memories torment us with all the force and freshness of the present moment, because they "correspond to traumas that have not been sufficiently acted upon."
Under hypnosis, the beaten clerk acted out a silent rage that he had to suppress, both on the street and in court. This is the basis of the abreactive technique: as the repressed memory rises to the surface of consciousness, the "accompanying affect" also rises, allowing the patient to describe as fully as possible the painful experience and the feelings it aroused. This is the psychotherapy of the “energetic reaction”, the release of a quantum of emotions proportional to the trauma received. This is a technique, the meaning of which is contained in such idiomatic phrases as "to cry" or "let off steam" [German. is sich austoben], literally "to bring oneself out of rage"], as well as in folk methods of managing anger, such as beating with a pillow. Without this hydraulic release, the suffering and anger experienced by the victim is only a constant burden on the nervous system.
The idea of a treatment targeting the unmetabolized pain stored in the deepest layers of the mind and body has since been resurrected in various therapies, most famously Arthur Janov's "primary therapy", commonly known as primal screaming therapy, which had a short-lived popularity. in the early 1970s. After months of therapy with Janova - an encounter brilliantly imagined in Kevin Barry's novel Beetlebone (2015) - John Lennon declared
l: "I am me, and I know why." Like Freud and Breuer, Janov saw psychic pain in the repressed traumas of early childhood. The suggested treatment was to release the trapped reactive anger in uninhibited and spontaneous screaming and ranting.
The very fact of living together forces us to give up our erotic and aggressive drives.
The abreaction theory suggests that feelings are stored in finite amounts so that they can be wept or vented until they are completely discharged. But as his thinking developed and clinical experience gained, Freud began to consider his belief in abreactions a mistake, albeit a productive one. What he lacks is the stubborn persistence of the feelings, their stubborn refusal to disappear on demand. The cries of an infant or a traumatized adult register a state of dissatisfaction, a gap between a need or desire - hunger, love, justice - and their fulfillment. But dissatisfaction is not just a temporary condition waiting to be relieved through appropriate action; it is an insurmountable condition of human life.
In "Civilization and Its Dissatisfaction" (1930), Freud argues that the very fact of living together makes us all give up our erotic and aggressive urges. To make room for everyone else, I must curb my extravagant appetites for love, power, and pleasure. While the theory of abreaction places our dissatisfaction in the external world - the painful experience is a "foreign body" like an employer's stick piercing our physical and mental skin - the appetites described by Freud in "Civilization and Its Dissatisfaction" are felt as an insistent internal tension , constant itching, requiring relief of a scratch. They come not from without, but from within, in what he calls instincts. Anger, in other words, is the primary way of expressing attraction when it needs to be gratified.
“Rage,” writes the American psychoanalyst Michael Eigen, summarizing Winnicott’s thinking in a meaningful way, “seems to be built into the cry of an infant.” In his book The Violence of Interpretation (1975), the French psychoanalyst Pierre Olanier offers the most consistent and radical development of this connection between anger and helplessness. She distinguishes two main ways in which the child's psyche represents its relation to another being (what psychoanalysis calls an "object") that exists side by side. In one, which Olanier calls love, the infant unites with its object in perfect union. In the other, which she calls hate, the infant perceives the object (say, the breastfeeding mother) as something he lacks and depends on for his survival. Raised against its addiction, the child's psyche, Olanier writes, is forced to recognize its own tendency to "get into a state of lack," in which the mind and body are in a state of helpless desire for what they are doing. do not have and cannot acquire for themselves.
Take my patient Gordon: his desire to love and be loved pushes him towards a partner. But love carved some paths in his deep memory; it means betrayal, rejection, disappointment. The conflict between the pressure of attraction and the need of the psyche to restrain this pressure becomes unbearable, as evidenced by headaches and insomnia.
Homer began the Iliad with a famous address to the Muse: “Sing, goddess, about the wrath of Achilles, the son of Peleus, about the damned anger that caused incalculable suffering to the Achaeans ...” The place of such elemental anger in the subsequent course of the history of culture can hardly be overestimated. Greek, Norse, and Hindu mythologies and theogony are replete with pure rage, echoed by writers and artists throughout the ages. Immeasurable anger—the devastating revenge of Medea and Hecuba, the jealous delirium of Othello, the blind fury of Captain Ahab, the unbridled ranting of Ice Cube and Eminem—has fascinated writers and readers for centuries.
It's hard to meet these figures today without remembering the public anger that seems to define our political present, the fierce struggle for justice around the world fueled by a harmful and ongoing history of racist and misogynistic violence and discrimination, and environmental looting, not to mention the reactive rage of nationalists and racists, militant men's rights activists, climate change deniers and COVID-19 conspirators. Rage of this kind contains the logic of attraction. It seems to come from a source deep within the soul, the force or "pressure" it exerts that breaks the boundaries of any possible vessel. Such rage seeks satisfaction, but there seems to be no object that can satisfy it.
The Iliad can be described as a failed attempt to bring Achilles' accursed wrath under the control of reason and measure. When the warrior Ayas reproaches him during
I failed mission to persuade him to join the battle against the Trojans for "wildness in his chest" and lack of "thought out of love for his comrades", Achilles does not deny the accusations. : "Everything you said seems to me very similar to my own feeling." “But,” he continues, “my heart is filled with anger whenever I think of the time when the son of Atreus despised me before the Argives.”
As Homer and Achilles remind us, it is not easy to keep anger on the side of reason and proportion.
"Before the Argives": I can't help feeling that Achilles' humiliation places him in the wildly anomalous company of a battered office worker. Achilles is forced to watch with tears in his eyes as his concubine Briseis, the "prize" of war, is taken from him by the powers of Agamemnon, just as an employee must submit to the power and violence of his boss and the word of judgment. Both are made to feel helpless in front of great forces and ashamed in front of a crowd of witnesses. Neither a person can control his anger, nor contain it. Achilles acknowledges that Ayas characterized his anger as "relentless and perverted", only to imply that this intransigence is the very core of the problem; rage has taken possession of him to such an extent that he cannot resist it. It is not in his gift to forgive or let go of resentment against him,
The inability of Homer's heroes to contain their emotions is at the heart of Socrates' argument for the expulsion of the poets from the Republic. The chanting of Achilles' wrath seduces the listener with a vicious indulgence in vices and a bad temper. Poetry "nourishes and nourishes" feelings that corrupt the soul; this "appoints them as rulers in us when they should be ruled."
Plato obviously does not want to abolish anger. The broader meaning of the Greek word thymos, which Homer's translator Martin Hammond translates as "wrath," is enthusiasm or passion. In Plato's Republic, Timos is an intermediate level in his tripartite division of the soul. As a capacity for self-assertion and a desire for recognition, its highest function is to direct anger against our own propensity for moral licentiousness and licentiousness. This is, one might say, an ancient version of what psychoanalysis might call the function of the inner parent or superego. Like Thymos, anger can be put to the service of moral self-discipline, helping to ensure that we remain rulers of our feelings, not ruled by them. But, as Homer and Achilles remind us, it is not easy to keep anger on the side of reason and measure.
If you do not obey the rule of reason, anger has an educational value. But, as historian Barbara Rosenwein has shown in her recent study of the history of anger, other philosophical and religious traditions are much less optimistic about the prospect of keeping anger under control of the mind. Intuitively perceiving anger as inherently excessive, various religious and philosophical traditions, both Eastern and Western, seek nothing less than the expulsion of anger from the repertoire of mental states.
The Buddha instructs us to "give up anger" as the root cause of unnecessary suffering. It inflates the ego's clouded self-importance, tormenting the mind of the angry person as much as it haunts the objects of his anger. Not surprisingly, Western versions of Buddhism have had a major influence on the development of modern anger management techniques. The same can be said about Stoicism, perhaps the Western philosophical tradition, the closest parallel to Buddhism. In Seneca's treatise "De Ira", published around 45 AD. e., anger is depicted as a force that drives the soul crazy, distorting our abilities for correct perception and judgment and pushing us to self-destruction with its indomitable impulse. Like the body of a man falling from a cliff, the onslaught of anger cannot be stopped - "its own weight and the downward nature of vices must - must - carry it away and drive it into the depths."
The stoic rejection of anger has inspired many modern philosophers and psychologists, especially the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum does not deny that our world causes daily and abundant moral outrage, but she insists that this outrage should be fully directed towards a practical solution, and its emotional remnants - the desire to inflict retaliatory suffering on the offender, the stubbornness of bitterness and malice - must be eliminated. . In other words, the cognitive recording of grounds for anger should never spill over into actual feelings of anger.
These more extreme views of anger—that it has no useful function and requires renunciation—are closer in a sense to the psychoanalytic view than the Platonic or Aristotelian view that anger is useful when kept within limits. Seneca's vivid depiction of anger as a force with its own fatal impulse is much closer to his character of attraction than Aristotle's notion of rational or proportionate anger. The complete denial of anger follows from the understanding that anger, according to St.
oh nature is excessive. Evil feelings may seek satisfaction, but there is always doubt as to what will satisfy them. By insisting that anger be directed towards correcting the errors that provoke it, Nussbaum misunderstands the underlying logic of anger.
Anger becomes a structural force, a permanent organ, a political source of urgent agitation for change.
The American philosopher Agnes Callard seems to get much closer to this logic in her essay On Anger (2020), which sees the stubborn indelibility of anger as its defining characteristic. Anger, she argues, is as constant as the resentment that provokes it; steal from me and you will steal from me forever. Whatever restorative efforts you make to appease my anger, the original theft cannot be undone; thus "if you have a reason to be angry, you have a reason to be angry always."
We might argue with Callard that the afterlife of trauma unfolds in the fluid and changing environment of memory and living relationships. While restorative efforts cannot change what has been done to me, they can change the meaning and meaning they have. Repentance and restitution of the offender may well reduce my assessment of the severity of the crime. But can this prospect of appeasement and forgiveness avoid what we might call an Achilles roadblock?
If Nussbaum had suggested to Achilles that the thief's restorative efforts would easily negate the basis of his anger, he would have responded with a derisive snort. In the end, through an embassy of warriors led by Nestor, Agamemnon offers Achilles a reward far in excess of that which he took from him for one concubine. He will not only return Briseis, Odysseus Achilles assures, but will also throw a dazzling array of gifts: abundant gold, prize horses, skillful and beautiful women, fertile cities, and one of his daughters as a bride. For the tradition that Nussbaum comes from, anger can be satisfied with a certain amount of reparative action. But for Achilles, the meaning of his anger lies precisely in the fact that he cannot be appeased, that no restitutive gesture can be adequate to him.
To say that anger is driven by the force of attraction is to say that it has no direct path to satisfaction, that it cannot be sure of what it is seeking or demanding. This is why, as Seneca observes, it can be carried away by its own impulse into an unreasonably destructive act.
In his study of the politics and economics of Timos, the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk argues that rage both shaped and destroyed the course of Western history precisely by rejecting any logic of balance and proportion. With Timos Achilles in no uncertain terms, he points out that the West's cherished means to stop the "endless pendulum of blows and retribution," from private spiritual exercises to public justice and foreign policy, may run into their own limits:
just as a purulent wound can become both a chronic and a general ailment, so spiritual and moral wounds may not heal, which creates its own perishable temporality, the infinity of an unanswered complaint.
Once we understand anger as an expression of attraction, the "endlessness of unanswered complaint" becomes a permanent possibility. The consequences of such an understanding for behavior in social and political life are unacceptably great. More than one feeling among others, anger becomes a structural force, a permanent organ, a political source of urgent agitation for change (Black Lives Matter) and weakened resistance to destruction (Blue Lives Matter) in the structure of society and the texture of everyday experience. .
Is there a source of anger more immediate and more powerful than the brute force of biological need? Necessity—hunger, cold, acute pain—ensures that the pressure of attraction is absolute and immediate. It is under the compulsion of necessity that we most acutely feel our original helplessness, and therefore anger is most apt to elude all our efforts to control it and take on the power of an endlessly unanswered complaint.
History shows that this is true of both mass politics and individual emotional life, as Hannah Arendt has shown above all. In "On the Revolution" (1963), Arendt attempts to explain why the French Revolution (and nearly all subsequent revolutions) eventually turned into unrestricted terror.
For Arendt, the most basic condition of life is human solidarity, that is, a common space for the interaction of competing voices. Thus, the main enemy of solidarity is that form of human suffering inherent in unsatisfied biological needs, which presses on us with a frenzy that Arendt calls "pre-political". Running a policy assumes that its participants are fed and protected. Where this assumption is not met, these spontaneous needs become the driving force of political action, and the need can be found publicly.
Its expression is only in violence. As soon as the force of elemental necessity unleashed its will into political life, writes Arendt, "malhereux turned into enragés, for rage is really the only form in which misfortune can manifest itself."
There is a violent and unedifying history of Left and Right movements using the inciting nature of anger.
Enrages occur when the poor and hungry can no longer endure their suffering, when, in the language of psychoanalysis, the pressure of attraction reaches its highest point. Enragés is the fruit of the desperation associated with achieving satisfaction by any other means, the desperation that finally resolved and pushed Robespierre's reign of terror into the 1790s. “This rage,” writes Arendt:
brings with it a momentum of true suffering, the destructive force of which is superior and, so to speak, more enduring than the raging madness of mere frustration.
Rage is the annulment of any political process. It's hard to imagine an insight more resonant with our moment. Not without reason, the Trump campaign in 2016, in an inventive strike against Hillary Clinton's widely perceived elitism, tweaked the Les Misérables iconographic poster, turning Victor Hugo's ragged fighters and flags of the Paris Commune into a noisy gang of MAGA believers - the Les Misérables. And yet the reference is, to put it mildly, ambiguous. If he invokes the Commune, he also alludes to the abyss of ironic distance from it. Our moment, as Trump's poster implies, is not so much a revolutionary spring as a cynical travesty of it, a mobilization of anger without a specific goal or object.
Robespierre's terror was the culmination of a zealous fury that could only consume itself along with its goals. The demagogic politics of Trump and Brexit recognize this fury and turn it into an infinitely renewable resource. It does not need to achieve stated goals, such as building a border wall or providing better access to cheap medicine. In fact, it is much more politically advantageous for the base to be in a state of escalating discontent that can be easily dumped on a huge number of its enemies and released, when appropriate, in the most dangerous quantities - say, in Charlottesville in August 2017. or at the US Capitol in January 2021.
Thus, there is a violent and non-edifying history of political movements of the Left and the Right that exploit the causative nature of anger - curbing its pressure, directing or manipulating its goals, changing the objects (immigrants, democrats, experts) according to the needs of the society. political moment. In both private and public life, the destructive potential of anger is rooted in its motivating nature. Anger is always threatened by a level of pressure that it cannot handle. The uncertainty of his goals and objects makes him constantly vulnerable to external manipulation as well as blind action.
And yet, while the motivating nature of anger is dangerous, it can also be especially enriching. Precisely because its aims and objects are changeable and indeterminate, it is capable of inquiring curiosity about itself. Because they evoke feelings I can't handle and desires I can't satisfy, cravings make me strange to myself. This strangeness, as we have seen, makes us ready for emotional manipulation both on an individual and collective level - if we always knew exactly what we want, we could not be manipulated into wanting something else. But it also makes possible the kinds of self-reflection facilitated by art, philosophy, and science, of which psychoanalysis is both everything and nothing.
If there is any basis for the distinction between destructive and just anger, it certainly is. The rhetorical style of Trump and his avatars is based on eliminating even the slightest hint of self-doubt, a trend that becomes all the more pervasive the more its content offends truth and human decency. Trump's refusal to recant or correct one of his countless proven lies, as well as the continued denial by Congressional Republicans of the widely documented January 6 insurgency violence, are prime examples of a strictly enforced self-examination embargo.
Authoritarian and demagogic anger draws its strength from the refusal to question oneself. He feeds not on sentences, but on the assertion of an indivisible and indisputable reality, which only a demagogue has the right to describe. It is an anger that can never confront or question itself, which is expressed as if it knows its own goals and objects with impeccable certainty. This is the spirit of Achilles' anger, the blindly righteous anger of a man who robbed a woman whom he himself robbed.
As Arendt has shown us, this tone of self-confidence is as inherent in the history of the revolutionary left as in reactionary
these right. Genuine and meaningful political anger, as opposed to the fabricated anger of dictators and populist leaders, must involve a kind of vigilant sense of self. We see an example of this suspicion in ourselves in the work of the black feminist theorist and activist Audre Lord, who writes in her essay The Use of Anger (1981): “I was trying to understand how useful my anger was for me, as well as its limitations.
There is enough injustice, cruelty and stupidity in the annals of history to fuel our lifelong rage.
When anger is explored from within the self-suspecting practice of thinking and feeling, its momentum slows down and becomes available for observation, reflection and play. I'm afraid this sounds like a simple matter when there is little that can be more difficult. I can't listen to the sinister mixture of cruelty and nonsense pouring out of the mouths of Trump and his henchmen without falling into a rage. It is hard to imagine that any of the witnesses to the murder of George Floyd or any of the countless crimes against racial justice of recent years, decades and centuries distance themselves from the burning anger they feel. There is enough injustice, cruelty and stupidity in the annals of history to fuel our lifelong rage.
But the particular advantage of art and psychoanalysis (which may well be interpreted as a disadvantage from the point of view of philosophical reason or scientific objectivity) is that they provide ways of experiencing such extreme feelings, making them open to curiosity and open investigation.
Over the years of our work, Gordon has felt relieved that I can perceive his rage without falling victim to the double temptation of dismissal and retribution, as if another way of communication has opened up for him, not defined by the same obsessive panic. Psychoanalysis slowly and uncertainly mitigated his propensity for reactive panic and its escalating consequences. I think that this change was facilitated primarily by the dual stance of psychoanalytic work, which meant that he could simultaneously feel his anger and sit next to it, remaining inside it and marveling at it from close range.
Reading the Iliad or the Medea is a very different experience, it has the same doubling effect on us, placing us both inside and apart from the passionate rages of the protagonists. Perhaps this dual stance, apart from submitting to it and the illusion that we could simply abandon it, is our best hope of learning to live with anger—our own and that of others.
