The force of anger

Anger is a main colour on the spectrum of human feeling. It’s one of the most primordial emotions. It involves the presence of at least one other person: a sense of injury that someone else has done us which makes us feel like we want to retaliate, to avenge ourselves. It’s one of the most venerable of human emotions, and one that is attested to across different cultures very early on.

Think of the Bible. First of all, in human relations, the serpent’s envy and anger causes the fall of humankind. Adam and Eve’s children quickly become rivals for the favour of God. When Cain has his offering to God disdained in favour of Abel’s, he feels injured; but, most importantly, he feels humiliated. It’s the humiliation that drives him to murderous rage and to kill his brother.

Anger is a destructive force, but one which can sometimes give us the sense that change cannot happen unless what exists is swept away. Of course, the other great biblical example comes from God himself: the famous flood which sweeps away the wickedness of worldly human beings.

Psychoanalysis is interested in anger from early on; in fact, it’s right there on the ground floor of psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, a general physician in Vienna, collaborated on a series of experiments in psychotherapy which would give rise to what we call psychoanalysis. In 1893, they write what they call a preliminary communication about their findings. They have an idea that the traumas that trouble our mental lives are caused by injuries: psychic injuries, or psychic foreign bodies that intrude. Often, this leads to a kind of lodged anger at the centre of the self.

One of the examples they give is of a man who has been humiliated in the street by his boss, who has attacked him with a stick. This employee finds himself unable, for whatever reason, to retaliate or to remonstrate with his boss, so he has to silently swallow his humiliation. Freud very briefly presents this case, but he says that under hypnosis, this man reproduces a second scene, in which he goes to court against his boss and actually fails to get satisfaction. So, the humiliation is doubled.

We’re dealing with a traumatised man in whom a feeling of humiliation has entrenched itself. This particular sense of injury, to the dignity of the human being at the very core – a violation at the most raw and vulnerable place – is the source of anger.

The pair of them make what Freud will acknowledge to be a therapeutic mistake. They come up with a theory of catharsis: abreaction. The idea is that you can get into the therapy room and do the verbal equivalent of punching a cushion – you shout and scream and give vent to all of the frustrations and the feelings of rage that you’re experiencing. If you do that for long enough, and thoroughly enough, you will cleanse yourself of your anger; you will come out of the room internally cleansed.

What Freud discovers down the line is that it doesn’t really work as simply as that. There is something about the feeling of humiliation that will not allow itself to be discharged in this way. It’s as though we’re being encouraged to think that anger is a discrete, localised feeling that you could simply get rid of. It turns out that that isn’t the case; anger is something much more diffuse, and its effect can’t be localised in that way. So, we become interested in anger as something bottomless, something that persists with a kind of unending force. In fact, the more we give expression to it, and the closer we get to it, the more – rather than less – intense it can become.

Women’s anger is both the same and different from the experience of the male employee who’s humiliated in the street. The humiliation from the man comes from the sense that his male status – his authority and dignity – has been fatally compromised in the eyes of the world. It induces shame; he doesn’t expect to be treated in this way.

What the #MeToo movement has shown us about women’s anger is something that we have all known and somehow refused to be aware of for so many centuries: that that special and traumatic experience of the man attacked by his boss is the ordinary experience that is swallowed by women across the world on a daily basis.

There’s a lot to learn from the way that psychoanalysis talks about the potential bottomlessness, the diffuseness, of this kind of anger. You can’t get rid of it by shouting or by somebody apologising to you. Over the long term it induces an injury that would require a much more thoughtful and comprehensive address than any sticking plaster, any discrete single action, could possibly provide.

Rather than short-term apologetics, which wants to address anger in order to leave it behind, what psychoanalysis tells us is that anger won’t be dealt with in that way. It needs a response that we might describe in non-psychoanalytic language as a just response. A response in terms of justice would be one that addressed the structural conditions that made the injury possible – the attitudes, the modes of thinking, the modes of behaviour that allow women to be perpetually injured as they go through their daily lives – and for that to become an internalised reality for men and, perhaps at least as importantly, for women.