Cognitive scientist Dr. Art Markman's recent posting on the nature of anger and catharsis raises significant questions about how to best deal with anger--both in and out of psychotherapy. This is a subject another PT blogger, Dr. Steven Stosny, and I briefly debated here previously. (See postings here and here.)
First, let me say that there is a very good reason for the numerous metaphors we apply to the misunderstood phenomenon of anger: They describe quite accurately and phenomenologically the subjective and objective experience of anger as a highly volatile emotion that can, depending on how we manage it, build over time, reach a crescendo, and eventually explode. Anger can be "bottled up." Fester, turn toxic, and seep out slowly and destructively in daily life, like radioactive contamination. Simmer and boil over. Anger is a primal force of nature, a hurricane, tornado, volcanic eruption, a thunderstorm, lightning bolt, a natural form of energy, not unlike electricity. When easily enraged, one "blows a fuse"or exhibits a "short fuse."
Anger is red hot. A smoldering or raging fire. Sometimes a "slow burn." We call someone quick to anger a "hot-head." A ticking time-bomb easily "set off" or "triggered." A powder keg. A steaming tea kettle. A boiling cauldron in which one "stews" in their own juices. Angry people "blow a gasket" under excessive internal pressure, like a heated cooking vessel that "flips its lid" or a missile warhead that "goes ballistic." Someone overcome by rage is often compared to a nuclear reactor that catastrophically and violently "melts down." Paradoxically, in other cases, the characterologically angry, resentful, bitter or hostile individual appears "cold-blooded" and calculating, as seen, for instance, in antisocial personality disorder, sometimes described as being "icy," "cool as a cucumber" or "stone-cold."
Perhaps metaphorically closest to the truth, anger or rage is a powerful explosive like dynamite, which can be used destructively or constructively, for evil or good. Like nuclear radiation or nitroglycerine, anger can be used both to harm and to heal. Anger can, under certain circumstances, take total possession of a person, driving us blindly into self-destructive behavior and evil deeds. Like love, anger can be "blind." Anger is often experienced as a threatening, malicious alien force taking over mind, body and soul. A ferocious beast, a berserk bear, a poisonous serpent, fire-breathing dragon, wrathful god, vindictive devil or demon. Such common metaphors clearly bear an archetypal quality, and have, in one form or another and across cultures, been part of how humans linguistically conceptualize and describe the subjective experience of anger for millennia. Like myths, metaphors of anger tend to contain a basic kernel of vital truth about the elemental, enigmatic nature of anger or rage.
But the mistake with using such metaphors is taking them too literally rather than metaphorically. For example, extreme rage may feel or appear like it takes possession of a person like a demon or the devil. This is a common myth or metaphor, one often seized upon by psychotic patients to explain their dissociated impulses. But that doesn't make anger the Devil. Literalism or reification is the problem in this scenario, not the metaphor. Likening anger to heated fluid in a closed container does not literally make it so. Nor can one extrapolate from that metaphor that anger will behave exactly like that heated fluid. It will not, because it is not literally heated fluid, and will not necessarily act as such. Anger is not this or that. It is what it is. But it does have similar qualities to other primary human experiences such as sadness, anxiety, and sex drive. Like other instinctual drives, existential experiences and primitive affects, anger can be denied or repressed. And when anger is chronically repressed, it becomes problematical, pathological, toxic and potentially dangerous to self and/or others. Once this occurs, the solution, however, is not to hit a punching bag: This will not make the anger, resentment or bitterness disappear. But it will likely provide some momentary release of tension, which, like masturbation, feels pleasurable. Striking a pillow, bag or bed when one is not already angry can be an effective technique employed by some Reichian or Bioenergetic therapists for inducing, evoking and becoming more aware of one's repressed rage. But one cannot "drain" or empty the anger permanently in this way, just as one doesn't drain sex drive permanently by masturbating. Indeed, this can serve instead to "prime the pump."
Dr. Markman and others argue against "catharsis," concluding that it only causes a person to become more angry than before. In support of his position, he cites a certain experimental study conducted in 1999. (See his posting.) A century before that study, Viennese physicians Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud (1895) discovered and documented the therapeutic value of catharsis or what they came to call abreaction: "The fading of a memory or the losing of its affect depends on various factors. The most important of these is whether there has been an energetic reaction to the event that provokes an affect. By ‘reaction" we here understand the whole class of voluntary and involuntary reflexes--from tears to acts of revenge--in which, as experience shows us, the affects are discharged. If this reaction takes place to a sufficient amount a large part of the affect disappears as a result. Linguistic usage bears witness to this fact of daily observation by such phrases as ‘to cry oneself out' [‘sich ausweinen'], and to ‘blow off steam' [‘sich austoben', literally ‘to rage oneself out']. If the affect is suppressed, the affect remains attached to the memory. . . . The injured person's reaction to the trauma only exercises a completely ‘cathartic' effect if it is an adequate reaction--as, for instance, revenge. But language serves as a substitute for action; by its help, an affect can be ‘abreacted' almost as effectively." This was the birth of psychoanalysis.
By "language," Freud and Breuer mean verbalizing feelings like anger, as opposed to physically acting them out. Punching a bag or pounding a bed are obviously physical expressions of anger. But in order to be truly cathartic, the patient must experience--or re-experience--these emotions as profoundly as possible rather than just physically expressing or rationally discussing them. The more apropos metaphor for repressed anger would be an underground oil or natural gas field. The oil is under tremendous pressure. When tapped into, some of that pressure is suddenly released in the form of a "gusher." But this doesn't do anything to significantly reduce the subterranean pressure built up over eons. Similarly, tapping into deep and chronically pressurized reserves of anger, resentment or rage can, indeed, bring more anger to the surface. This is why merely abreacting or ventilating anger is not necessarily therapeutic: Ventilation, as Dr. Markman suggests, can fan the flames of anger rather than extinguishing its fire. Certainly giving destructive expression to anger in the form of physical violence is no solution. Can mass murderers or abusive spouses said to be "cured" or made less angry by physically discharging their rage on their victims?
When we are dealing with anger, we are not dealing with a metaphor. We are dealing with an existential reality. A psychobiological phenomenon. Punching a bag, let's face it, is not the same as punching out the person who hurt your feelings or betrayed you. It is not, as Freud and Breuer put it, an "adequate" response to the insult, no real revenge or talionic lashing out against a real person. It gives someone a tiny taste of what real revenge might feel like, but lacks the complete psychological satisfaction. Such ventilationist behavior knocks on buried anger's door, opens it briefly letting just a little anger out, and then promptly slams it shut again--which is exactly what happened in the experiment mentioned by Dr. Markman.
