Daimon Publishers
Varieties of Anger and their Transformation
Jan Wiener
London, England
Society of Analytical Psychology
As analysts, we tend to use the word anger in an ambiguous and over-general way; it is actually a subtle, complex affect with many nuances of meaning. In the words of Aristotle (1976), "It is not easy to define how and with whom and for what reasons and how long one ought to be angry, or within what limits a person does this rightly or wrongly" (p. 162). I have become interested in why it is that for some patients in analysis, experiences of anger or "the darker passions" (Person 1993, p. 2) may be harnessed creatively into development that is life-enhancing and leads to growth while, for others, these experiences may remain suppressed, somatised, acted-out or in other ways rendered unusable in the service of the unfolding of the self.
The constellation of a major grievance rooted in a traumatic infancy is linked with hatred and can block, defensively, the harnessing of the healthy assertiveness necessary for separation, individuation and creativity. Aggression is the foundation stone of affects such as anger. To address the nature of grievance, we must differentiate anger from two other centrally-related affects, rage and hatred, in their manifestations in analysis and in terms of the dialectical relationship between ego and self. From my work with a male and a female patient in intensive analysis for some years, I found that, at critical times during both analyses, I was taxed severely in processing my own anger, in order to stay in touch with the hurt that was hidden by the psychic manifestations of the grievance.
Jung placed great emphasis on the psychology of affects: "The essential basis of our personality is affectivity. Thought and action are, as it were, only symptoms of affectivity" (CW3, 78). Affects are archetypal and emerge as patterns of experience, associated with unconscious fantasies and images in infancy. These are organized gradually as part of early object relationships, while the infant develops a sense of subjective identity.
A problem we have with understanding "anger" is that it overlaps with and is related to many other words. My own free associations to the word anger include: rage, aggression, assertiveness, self-affirmation, destructiveness, grievance, grudge, hatred, revenge, fury, indignation, power and evil. Definitions of anger are varied but most suggest, as does Jung (CW6, 681) that anger combines a psychic feeling state and a physiological innervation state.. Both body and mind are involved.
We have all experienced anger, which - as the seventeenth century poet Thomas Fuller wrote - "is one of the sinews of the soul." Some patients arrive consciously angry; others are unable to get in touch with their anger. The ego can become organized around anger. Thus, it is not just a free-standing affect but a property of all relationships. Models of the psychic functioning of anger in relationships are not yet well developed, but what we do know is that when anger is unconscious or suppressed in the patient, in the analyst, or within their relationship, it can be destructive. At its most dangerous, anger leads to cruelty, hatred, revenge and - collectively and culturally - to wars. William Blake wrote about the dangerous effects of suppressed, murderous anger in his poem, "A Poison Tree:"
I was angry with my friend,
I told my wrath, my wrath did end;
I was angry with my foe,
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
An illustration of two kinds of anger is found in Shakespeare's King Lear. The play is based on an old Celtic fairy tale in which an ageing King decides to relinquish his kingdom to his three daughters. In the play, Shakespeare explores the powerful emotions aroused between parents and children and immerses us chillingly in a study of the cruelest aspects of the human psyche. King Lear and Edmund - another character in the play - have both suffered what we would call today severe narcissistic wounds; they are angry.
Lear feels betrayed by his youngest daughter, Cordelia who, he feels, does not love him as much as he loves her. His grief and rage stir him to action in the famous quotation: "Touch me with noble anger." Lear becomes insane with rage. During the play, however, Lear's rage is transformed before he ultimately dies. When his rage is spent, his wound is transformed from a narcissistic grievance into a source of empathy with others.
Edmund is illegitimate, the younger son of the Earl of Gloucester; he will not inherit his father's wealth. As a consequence, Edmund is filled with intense envy and jealousy. He protests angrily against the assumption that he is low and vile because he is illegitimate and forges a letter in his brother's hand, threatening to kill their father for his wealth. Edmund coldly and ruthlessly sets out to turn his father against his brother. His career of crime is built on a narcissistic wound which becomes a life-long grievance and remains largely unmitigated and untransformed. He is relentless almost to his death.
In both cases, anger fuels a desire for revenge. Lear's rage is ultimately transformed and Edmund's hatred remains, as he puts it, "of mine own nature." In terms of psychic functioning, they illustrate contrasting forms of anger whose potential for transformation may be illuminated further by making a conceptual distinction between anger, rage and hatred.
Anger
I have borrowed part of the title of this paper, Under the Volcano, from Malcolm Lowry's powerful novel of the same name. Lowry's imaginative and original use of the hot, steamy visual imagery and symbolism of the volcano brings out the unpredictability of life in Mexico and the frightening, destructive eruptions of the main character, the alcoholic consul. The archetypal power of volcanic imagery also has considerable relevance in the consulting room and, in particular, as a metaphor to understand the vicissitudes of the affect of anger. The God of Israel began as a volcano God at Mount Sinai. Many patients talk of feeling as if there is a "volcano inside them" to convey the power of the anger they are experiencing and their fear of the possibility of dangerous eruptions with destructive consequences. For centuries, active volcanoes have been seen to represent the underworld of dangerous gods to whom sacrifices must be made. Sontag (1993) brings these fears to life when she writes about a volcano as a "monstrous living body, ... the slumbering giant that wakes, ... flushes the marrow out of your bones and topples your soul" (pp. 5-6). Redfearn (1992) discusses a volcano dream of one of his patients in terms of "uncontainable passions" (p. 101).
When we talk of volcanic eruptions, however, are we really talking about anger or the more intense, even violent emotion of rage? Here our terminology becomes confusing and it is necessary to pay careful attention to the conceptual differences between anger, rage and hatred.
Diamond (1966) compares anger with rage, using the metaphor of an electric switch: "Rage appears to operate via an 'on' or 'off' switching mechanism, with the 'on' position consisting of one constant voltage; anger ... can be controlled by way of a 'dimmer' switch, which modulates the relative intensity of the current" (p. 11). Diamond thinks that anger and rage spring from the same elemental source, although anger may be less intensely felt.
I believe that anger and rage are linked affects but, in terms of psychic functioning, they are different. Although anger is a complex emotion, in general it is aroused when desired goals are frustrated. As a way of overcoming obstacles, anger is usually conscious, ego-related, has a cognitive component and is, up to a point, controllable. Both ego and self are involved. In anger, the ego is acting as the executive of the self; in rage, it is overwhelmed by the self in its negative aspect. Anger is not necessarily destructive and is often part of normal, healthy narcissism or an attempt to regulate social interactions. It is part of the rhythmic deintegrative/reintegrative process wherein the self unpacks its archetypal potentialities by reaching out for real experiences. It is when angry feelings are unsatisfactorily mediated, leading to anxiety and splitting, that anger becomes disorganized or repressed and the capacity for rage may develop. Anger can be verbal, physical, direct, repressed, stifled, sublimated, hot or cold, a communication or a defence, but, as Person (1993) puts it, "anger represents a victory of assertion over intimidation, strength over fear" (p. 3).
Rage
Rage is hot, elemental and acute. It is a primitive affect arising from the unconscious. It is unpredictable, unbounded and dangerous. We talk of "burning rage," of "boiling with rage" or of "blowing one's top." Rage captures the body and touches the self. The metaphor of a volcano is surely a more appropriate evocation of the archetypal experience of rage than of anger. Volcanoes erupt when the plates of the earth's crust collide. Melting minerals called magma become trapped in reservoirs and, ultimately, explode.
Rage is a result of a personal insult, a narcissistic wound often connected with shame. I like Lewis' (1993) idea of rage as a process: "Shame leads to rage, which leads to more shame, which leads to more rage" (p. 159). It is a more primitive and diffuse experience than anger, and can be generated by an external or an internal assault on the self. Rage bypasses the ego. It comes straight from the self. The opposites of nature and culture come together but cannot make a new synthesis. Thus, like the plates of the earth's crust in a volcanic eruption, there is a violent internal clash. The pressure is too much and fears of annihilation are aroused. Rage comes from a collapsed or disintegrated sense of identity, when patients may feel as if they and their analysts are "exploding," like magma, or "falling to pieces." One patient needed to telephone me to make sure he had not "toppled my soul" after a particularly violent outburst of rage. The image of a blackened landscape following a volcanic eruption conveys expressively some patients' images of destruction, which may accompany an experience of rage. Rage threatens the very essence of our feelings about ourselves and, in its extreme, can lead to murder or the ultimate rage against the self, suicide.
Jung saw rage as a primitive, archetypal affect: "When we are beside ourselves with rage, we are obviously no longer identical with ourselves, but are possessed by a demon or spirit" (CW8, 627-628). Rage and madness are often intertwined and King Lear's words, "Touch me with noble anger," are really about rage. His temporary "madness" is surely different from the more coherent anger which seems to be more ego-related.
Hatred
Jung's preoccupation with the relationship between good and evil provides a relevant setting for a discussion of the nature of hatred. He rejected the Augustinian concept of privatio boni: to be evil means to be deprived of good. He believed that evil is much more than a turning away from good, and that good and evil are a logically equivalent pair of opposites. Hatred and love are also in a dialectical relationship. One is not an absence of the other, but rather they exist as a pair of opposites which struggle to coexist in an ambivalent relationship.
Hatred exists on a spectrum ranging from positive, benign hatred to a more malign, destructive form. Bollas (1987) talks of "loving hatred" where the aim is not destructive, but rather to act out an unconscious form of love in order to preserve a relationship. Blake's sentiment, "I was angry with my friend, I told my wrath, my wrath did end," seems to be more about benign hatred. We are also familiar with destructive and malignant hatred which is acted out in violent, sadistic acts towards others or the self. Here, hatred can be linked relevantly with Glasser's (1986) concept of sadism where the aim may be to inflict suffering on the other.
Hatred is much more focused than anger or rage and has usually become a stable part of the personality structure, as in Colman's (1988) idea of "the wound that will neither heal nor [contribute to] healing" (p. 77). Hatred involves several wishes: to destroy, to cause suffering and to control. It nearly always involves paranoid fears of retaliation. Whereas rage disrupts or fragments the ego, hatred sharpens it. Rage explodes; hatred smoulders and simmers. Lord Byron says in his poem "Don Juan":
Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure;
Men love in haste but they detest at leisure.
As Akhtar (1995) points out, "Rage is an immediate uncontrollable body response, hatred involves thoughts and can mean the suppression of muscular activity. ... Rage unshackles the self from the object, hatred traps the individual to the object" (p. 89). Hatred is paradoxical. It emerges from traumatic origins and involves primitive defence mechanisms of the self, such as splitting and projective identification, but it manifests itself at a sophisticated level of consciousness where ego fragments have coalesced, albeit in a distorted way, to form a fixed complex.
Grievance
The main theme of my paper is grievance, a central component of hatred. Some patients who suffer a severe early narcissistic wound develop a persistent grievance in a moral context involving blame. Patients with a grievance feel they have been wronged in some fundamental way and are the victims of gross psychic injury to which they cling determinedly (see Steiner, 1993). The clinging has three main functions. First, it is a means by which the integrity of the self may be preserved from further damage by the other. Second, it is a means by which patients may remain close to the object of their grievance in the hope of finding love. Third, it helps to prevent disintegration. Rage leads to hatred, which leads to grievance, then to hatred, more rage and so on. The grievance becomes self-destructive; its fixed quality stultifies creativity.
Clinical Illustrations
Two patients, "Robert" and "Barbara," have been in analysis with me three or four times a week for several years. Both have a central grievance; they hate their mothers. They have not had their aggression sufficiently well mediated, and they are left with a constant, conscious, simmering hatred for their mothers - which is projected unconsciously into me. I have been left sometimes with the feeling of being trapped; my own emotions are in danger of becoming uncontrollable.
Robert is a 50-year-old man who came into analysis after the break-up of an intense love affair. It had left him exceedingly depressed, with numerous somatic symptoms and a terror of dying. He is the second of four brothers and has a screen memory of being actively rejected by his mother. When he was two, she said to him, "I don't want you, go to your father." He feels that his mother actively disliked him while she loved his older and his youngest brothers. His mother had a serious phobia about germs and she seems to have selected Robert as the recipient of her projections to be the ill child. She repeatedly took him to hospital for chest X-rays, to which he attributes his recently-discovered sterility. He has a later, significant memory of being taken to visit his mother in hospital when he was three, after she had a miscarriage. He remembers seeing her through a glass screen and feeling extremely upset that he was not allowed to approach or touch her.
He frequently feels emasculated, particularly in his relationships with women and inevitably in his transference to me. Not only does he feel that his mother did not love him, but that she actually wished him dead. He seems to have erected an internal screen, or "concrete bunker" as he calls it, as a defence of the self to protect himself from her sadistic attacks, but this has left him impoverished, as the bunker splits him off from his emotions.
I like him and he takes his analysis very seriously, but he is compliant and very anxious about upsetting me, in case I erupt, as did his unpredictable mother. Any expression of irritation or anger feels to him dangerously destructive and must be suppressed. He wants me to remain the soothing mother at all times. All the affect appears in his dreams, which are often apocalyptic, violent and disturbing for us both. Dreams of natural disasters such as tidal waves and fires progressed to a series involving murder and mayhem, and then to dreams of damaged, distorted baby animals - a true archetypal hell. This raw energy rampages but cannot be lived, mediated and fully digested because it is blocked by his concrete bunker. If I am more challenging, I become his sadistic, retaliatory mother. Forced into this strait jacket, I have found myself overtaken with an overwhelming lassitude: a leaden, soporific feeling where I retreat into a passive, sleepy silence. My capacity to feel angry in a positive way that could help him is anaesthetized, and my imaginative capacities become deadened. I feel as if I am of no use to him.
Here is the deprivation and grievance. Robert's hatred towards his murderous mother could not be lived and mediated; it has become an enduring part of his personality. He is unconsciously identified with his aggressor mother. This has left him with no containing outlet for his aggression, which remains terrifying, encapsulated in an archaic form, and unavailable for expression and transformation within the analytic relationship. He needs this part of his personality to move forward in his masculine identity, but it remains unintegrated with his more passive, defensive persona, with which he is identified. Robert has experienced a violent assault on his core sense of himself, which leaves him impoverished - as the dream suggests. Coming alive in the analysis, which includes a space for anger and rage to find expression between us, also means grieving the absence of maternal love. To reach out for nourishing new seeds of life in our relationship, which might then be murdered for a second time, is a big risk and has taken many years to explore.
Barbara also came into analysis during a series of frightening somatic episodes, including a preoccupation with losing bowel control in public situations. This occurred at the juxtapositon of two difficult personal life experiences. Her marriage became less satisfying, leaving her with insecurities about the future and, at the same time, she needed to have surgery. Barbara has experienced a double narcissistic wound. She is illegitimate and feels she has no birthright. To be an unwanted child is the ultimate betrayal. She also experienced her adoptive mother, to whom she was sent at the age of 14 months, as critical and unloving. They fought bitterly until her mother died some years ago.
Barbara feels fundamentally unlovable. She frequently idealises men, but women - particularly authority figures - are often poisonous and not to be trusted. The basic wound is easily inflamed, making her angry and volatile but unable to reveal how hurt she feels. She becomes caught in a persecutory inner world and must remain alert at all times to keep her persecutors at bay. Any experience of rejection or conflict in her external world, and in the analysis with me, sets in motion a rapid, well-defined internal process like a toppling cascade of falling dominoes. Rejection leads to a feeling of deprivation, then to anger, contempt and outrage that she deserves better. Her aggression takes on a moral mode, which provokes a determined fight to make the rejecting others love her or change their minds about her. She remains fiercely attached to her attackers, omnipotently trying to change them. When she fails, she clings to the bad object, as this is better than nothing at all.
Barbara is a talented woman, intellectually gifted and very articulate, but she can use thoughts and words as weapons: to attack, defeat and distance. Quietness in sessions is rare, as if any potentially creative, more reflective, space between us will leave her open to dangerous attacks. She describes herself as a terrier working hard in her analysis. I sometimes experience this approach as her determination to remain self-sufficient: using a prickly, combative carapace persona to keep me at bay from her softer, immensely vulnerable core sense of self.
At the beginning of the analysis, I frequently felt as if whatever I offered was chewed up and spat out. When Barbara was distressed, I felt I could not soothe her. Moreover, my understanding was experienced as an attack, fuelling her anger and defensiveness. On one occasion, when we were having a particularly difficult time, she told me that she thought I planted things inside her which did not belong to her; they were alien. On another occasion, she told me that she could not say nice things to me in case I became complacent. Hatred seemed to be keeping our relationship alive. For a time, her aggression and contempt made me defensive, irritable and, on occasion, volatile. I was contributing to an enactment of her inner trauma. At these moments, I disliked her, and felt narcissistically wounded myself. It was only later, when she alerted me to her need for me to attend to the child in pain behind this hard carapace, that I found myself better able to process my countertransference affects. She was right. I was losing my analytic capacity, caught up unhelpfully with the process of her grievance. It was only after this realization that we both could attend more safely to her vulnerable child self, hiding in terror from danger.
Barbara's grievance takes the form of an unmediated archetypal dominant relationship between two extremes: hatred toward her mother and hatred toward herself. There is only a victim or a victimizer, a winner or a loser; either the other is all wrong or Barbara is all wrong. As we gradually live out the pain and grievance within our relationship and understand it, both Barbara and I have had to face our capacity to hate and to accept it. She acknowledges that she has a "chip on her shoulder." I have had to face the full force of my uncomfortable, negative countertransference affects.
For Barbara, they explode into an excess of negative affect, causing difficulties in her relationships. This is an opposite pole of the same psychic constellation from Robert's. I experienced them first in the form of my own countertransference hatred: implosions into sleepiness with Robert and explosions of defensive anger with Barbara.
Primitive, archetypal hatred can be experienced and transformed into an ambivalent personal relationship encompassing both love and hate. This process is dependent on the analyst's ability to maintain a creative space in which fantasies can live, play and be contained. In my experience, this ideal is not always achievable. The strong psychic and bodily impact of hatred can become constellated in the relationship between ourselves and our patients. Our thinking capacities may be seriously impaired, constricting this creative space. Containing and processing the violent affects that may emerge during the work is, in turn, likely to depend upon our relationship to our own narcissistic needs and affects. As Winnicott (1947) has emphasized, our patients will be able to tolerate their own hate only if the analyst can hate them. But, paradoxically, our patients' evoking hatred in us can lead us to deny our hate. For a maternal grievance to be transformed, facilitating mourning, some essential work has to happen first within the analyst in order to process affects that result from the force of the inevitable projections and projective identifications from the patient.
Conclusions
The theme of this Congress is "Destruction and Creation." I have concentrated on personal transformations in my patients, in myself and within our analytic relationship. We use the term anger - like the term love - too generally, thereby masking subtly different emotions observable in clinical work. The primal self has the potential for both love and hate, for both creativity and destructiveness. Theoretical understanding of the manifestations of anger, rage and hatred in the consulting room can help to enhance our understanding of intrapsychic and interpersonal mental functioning, in particular the dialectical relationship between ego and self.
My searches have taken me, via a number of mazes, down one central path toward an understanding of grievance, a moral expression of hatred, which embodies a particular struggle between destructive and creative forces. As Kundera (1991) remarked, "hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary" (p. 26). For such patients, clinging to their grievances helps to preserve the integrity of their defensive self structure. But when there is hatred and punishment embedded within the grievance, this can prevent or postpone the loss and mourning necessary for the ego to surrender some of its powers in the service of the self as a whole.
As analysts, we try to remain in touch with the hurt behind our patients' passions, often necessitating a parallel painful struggle to transform our own violent affects into knowledge. After a volcanic eruption, the soil recovers and becomes fertile. The best wine may be made from grapes that flourish from the ash on the slopes of a volcano.
References
Akhtar, S. (1995). Some reflections on the nature of hatred and its emergence in the treatment process. In S. Akhtar, S. Kramer & H. Parens (Eds.), The Birth of Hatred. Northvale, NJ/London: Jason Aronson.
Aristotle (1976). The Ethics of Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethis. London: Penguin Classics.
Bollas, C. 1987). Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. London: Free Association Books.
Colman, W. (1988). After the fall: Original loss and the limits of redemption. Free Associations, 13, 59-83.
Diamond, S.A. (1996). Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil and Creativity. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Glasser, M. (1986). Identification and its vicissitudes as observed in the perversions. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 67-9, 9-17.
Kundera, M. (1991). Immortality. London/Boston: Faber & Faber.
Lewis, M. (1993). The development of anger and rage. In R.A. Glick & S.P. Roose (Eds.), Rage, Power and Aggression The Role of Affect in Motivation, Development, and Adaptation. New Haven/London: Yale University Press.
Person, E.S. (1993). Introduction. In R.A. Glick, & S.P. Roose (Eds.), Rage, Power and Aggression: The Role of Affect in Motivation, Development, and Adaptation. New Haven/London: Yale University Press.
Redfearn, J. (1992). The Exploding Self. Wilmette, IL: Chiron.
Sontag, S. (1993). The Volcano Lover: A Romance. London: Vintage.
Steiner, J. (1993). Psychic Retreats. London: Routledge.
Winnicott, D.W. (1947). Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis. London: Hogarth Press.
Email: info@daimon.ch
Daimon Publishers