THE exact sciences consist of a body of truth which all accept, and to which
all experts strive to contribute. Philosophy, however, like religion, has
always been broken into sects, schools or parties, and the body of truth
which all accept in these fields is relatively far less, and the
antagonistic views far greater. Normal psychology, which a few decades ago,
started out to be scientific with the good old ideal of a body of truth
semper ubique et ad omnibus, is already splitting into introspectionists,
behaviorists, genetic, philosophical and other groups, while in the new
Freudian movement, Adler and Jung are becoming sectaries, the former drawing
upon himself the most impolitic and almost vituperative condemnation of the
father of psychoanalysis. With this latter schism we are not here concerned,
but we are deeply concerned with the more general relations between the
psychologists of the normal and those of the abnormal; with a very few
negligible exceptions psychoanalysis has hardly ever had a place on the
program of our American Psychological Association, and the normal has had
little representation in your meetings and publications. This I deem
unfortunate for both, for unsatisfactory as this sadly needed rapprochement
is on the continent, it is far more so here. That the normalists in this
country so persistently ignore the unique opportunity to extend their
purview into the psychopathological domain at the unique psychological
moment that the development of Freudianism has offered, is to me a matter of
sad disappointment and almost depression. In reading a plea for Freud in our
association of normalists, I am a vox clamantis in deserto and can evoke no
response, and even the incursions of psychoanalysis into the domain of
biography, myth, religion and dreams, have not evoked a single attempt at
appreciation or criticism worthy of mention by any American psychologist of
the normal. I have sought in various ways the causes of this reticence, not
to say ignorance. While I received various answers, the chief one was to the
effect that the alleged hypertrophy of sex in its gross pathological forms,
and the conviction of the kind and degree of sex consciousness found in the
many hundreds of analyzed cases, are so unique and constitute the very
essence of the neurotic and psychotic cases, and conscious and unconscious
sex factors are slight or absent in most normal cases, that these patients
and their doctors alike are sex-intoxicated, and that the Freudian
psychology applies only to perverts and erotomania or other abnormal cases.
To ascribe all this aversion to social or ethical repression is both shallow
and banousic, for the real causes are both manifold and deeper. They are
part of a complicated protest of normality, found in all and even in the
resistance of subjects of analysis, which is really a factor which is basal
for self-control of the varying good sides of which Freudians tell us
nothing. The fact is that there are other things in the human psyche than
sex, and its ramifications. Hunger, despite Jung, fear despite Sadger, and
anger despite Freud, are just as primary, aboriginal and independent as sex,
and we fly in the face of fact and psychic experience to derive them all
from sex, although it is freely granted that in morbid cases each may take
on predominant sex features. In what follows I can only very briefly hint at
the way in which some of the Freudian mechanisms are applied to one of the
emotions, viz., anger.
Anger in most of its forms is the most dynamogenic of all the emotions. In
paroxysms of rage with abandon we stop at nothing short of death and even
mutilation. The Malay running amuck, Orlando Furioso, the epic of the wrath
of Achilles, hell-fire, which is an expression of divine wrath, are some
illustrations of its power. Savages work themselves into frenzied rage in
order to fight their enemies. In many descriptions of its brutal aspects,
which I have collected, children and older human brutes spit, hiss, yell,
snarl, bite noses and ears, scratch, gouge out eyes, pull hair, mutilate sex
organs, with a violence that sometimes takes on epileptic features and which
in a number of recorded cases causes sudden death at its acme, from the
strain it imposes upon the system. Its cause is always some form of
thwarting wish or will or of reduction of self-feeling, as anger is the acme
of self-assertion. The German criminalist, Friedrich, says that probably
every man might be caused to commit murder if provocation were sufficient,
and that those of us who have never committed this crime owe it to
circumstances and not to superior power of inhibition. Of course it may be
associated with sex but probably no human experience is per se more
diametrically opposite to sex. Some temperaments seem to crave, if not need,
outbreaks of it at certain intervals, like a well-poised lady, so
sweet-tempered that everybody imposed on her, till one day at the age of
twenty-three she had her first ebullition of temper end went about to her
college mates telling them plainly what she thought of them, and went home
rested and happy, full of the peace that passeth understanding. Otto Heinze,
and by implication Pfister, think nations that have too long or too
assiduously cultivated peace must inevitably sooner or later relapse to the
barbarisms of war to vent their instincts for combat, and Crile thinks anger
most sthenic, while Cannon says it is the emotion into which most others
tend to pass. It has of course been a mighty agent in evolution, for those
who can summate all their energies in attack have survived. But few if any
impulsions of man, certainly not sex, have suffered more intense, prolonged
or manifold repressions. Courts and law have taken vengeance into their
hands or tried to, and not only a large proportion of assaults, but other
crimes, are still due to explosions of temper, and it may be a factor in
nearly every court case. Society frowns on it, and Lord Chesterfield says
the one sure and unfailing mark of a gentleman is that he never shows
temper. Its manifestations are severely tabooed in home and school. Religion
teaches us not to let the sun go down upon our wrath and even to turn the
other cheek, so that we go through life chronically afraid that we shall
break out, let ourselves go, or get thoroughly mad, so that the moment we
begin to feel a rising tide of indignation or resentment (in the
nomenclature of which our language is so very rich, Chamberlain having
collected scores of English expressions of it), the censorship begins to
check it. In many cases in our returns repression is so potent from long
practice, that the sweetest smile, the kindest remarks or even deeds are
used either to veil it to others, or to evict it from our own consciousness,
or else as a self-inflicted penance for feeling it, while in some tender
consciences its checked but persistent vestiges may become centers of morbid
complexes and in yet other cases it burrows and proliferates more or less
unconsciously, and finds secret and circuitous ways of indulgence which only
psychoanalysis or a moral or religious confessional could trace.
I. Anger has many modes of Verschiebung, both instinctive and cultivated.
One case in our returns carries a bit of wood in his vest-pocket and bites
it when he begins to feel the aura of temper. Girls often play the piano
loudly, and some think best of all. One plays a particular piece to divert
anger, viz., the "Devil's Sonata." A man goes down cellar and saws wood,
which he keeps for such occasions. A boy pounds a resonant eavespout. One
throws a heavy stone against a white rock. Many go off by themselves and
indulge in the luxury of expressions they want none to hear. Others take out
their tantrum on the dog or cat or perhaps a younger child, or implicate
some absent enemy, while others curse. A few wound themselves, and so on,
till it almost seems, in view of this long list of vicariates, as if almost
any attack, psychic or physical, might thus be intensified, and almost
anything or person be made the object of passion. Be it remembered, too,
that not a few look, do, think, feel their best under this impulsion.
II. Besides these modes of Abreagierung there are countless forms of
sublimation. In anger a boy says: I will avenge myself on the bully who
whipped me and whom I cannot or will not whip, by besting him in his
studies, class-work, composition, or learn skilful stunts that he cannot do,
dress, or behave better, use better language, keep better company, and thus
find my triumph and revenge. A man rejected or scorned by a woman sometimes
makes a great man of himself, with the motivation more or less developed to
make her sorry or humiliated. Anger may prompt a man to go in to win his
enemy's girl. A taunt or an insult sometimes spurs the victim of it to
towering ambition to show the world and especially the abuser better, and to
be able to despise him in return; and there are those who have been thus
stung to attempt greatness and find the sweetest joy of success in the
feeling that by attaining it they compensate for indignities they suffered
in youth. In fact, when we analyze ambition and the horror of
Minderwertigkeit that goes with it, we shall doubtless find this factor is
never entirely absent, while if we were to apply the same pertinacity and
subtlety that Jung in his "Wandlungen" has brought to bear in working over
the treacherous material of mythology, we might prove with no less
verisimilitude than he has shown the primacy of the libido that in the
beginning was anger, and that not Anaxagoras' love or the strife of
Heraclitus was the fons et origo of all things, that the Ichtrieb is basal,
and that the fondest and most comprehensive of all motives is that to excel
others, not merely to survive, but to win a larger place in the sun, and
that there is some connection between the Darwinian psychogenesis and Max
Stirner and Nietzsche, which Adler has best evaluated.
III. Anger has also its dreams and reveries. When wronged the imagination
riots in fancied humiliation and even tortures of an enemy. An object of
hate may be put through almost every conceivable series of degradation,
ridicule, exposure and disgrace. He is seen by others for what our hate
deems him to be. All disguises are stripped off. Children sometimes fancy a
hated object of anger flogged until he is raw, abandoned by all his friends,
an outcast, homeless, alone, in the dark, starving, exposed to wild animals,
and far more often more prosaic fancies conceive him as whipped by a parent
or stronger friend, or by the victim himself later. Very clever strategies
are thought out in detail by which the weaker gets even with or vanquishes
the stronger, and one who suffers a rankling sense of injustice can hardly
help day-dreaming of some form of comeuppance for his foe, although it takes
years to do it. In these reveries the injurer in the end almost always gives
up and sues for mercy at the feet of his quondam victim. So weird and
dramatic are these scenes often that to some minds we must call anger and
hate the chief springs of the imagination. A pubescent girl who was deeply
offended went off by herself and held an imaginary funeral of her enemy,
hearing in fancy the disparaging remarks of the bystanders, and when it was
all over and the reaction came, she made up with the object of her passion
by being unusually sweet to her and even became solicitous about her health
as fearing that her revery might come true. We all too remember Tolstoi's
reminiscences when, having been flogged by his tutor, he slunk off to the
attic, weeping and broken-hearted, and finally after a long brooding
resolved to run away and become a soldier, and this he did in fancy,
becoming corporal, lieutenant, captain, colonel. Finally came a great
battle where he led a desperate charge that was crowned with victory, and
when all was over and he stood tottering, leaning on his sword, bloody and
with many a wound, and the great Czar of all the Russias approached, saluted
him as saviour of his fatherland and told him to ask whatever he wanted and
it was his, replied magnanimously that he had only done his duty and wanted
no reward. All he asked was that his tutor might be brought up and his head
cut off. Then the scene changed to other situations, each very different,
florid with details, but motivated by ending in the discomfiture of the
tutor. In the ebb or ambivalent reaction of this passion he and the tutor
got on better.
IV. Richardson has collected 882 cases of mild anger, introspected by
graduate students of psychology, and finds not only over-determination,
anger fetishes and occasionally anger in dreams with patent and latent
aspects and about all the Freudian mechanisms, but what is more important,
finds very much of the impulsion that makes us work and strive, attack and
solve problems has an element of anger at its root. Life is a battle and for
every real conquest man has had to summate and focus all his energies, so
that anger is the acme of the manifestation of Schopenhauer's will to live,
achieve and excel. Hiram Stanley rather absurdly described it as an epoch
when primitive man first became angry and fought, overcoming the great
quaternary carnivora and made himself the lord of creation. Plato said
anger was the basis of the state, Ribot made it the establisher of justice
in the world, and Bergson thinks society rests on anger at vice and crime,
while Stekel thinks that temper qualities should henceforth be treated in
every biography and explored in every case that is psychoanalyzed. Hill's
experiments with pugilism, and Cannon's plea for athletics as a legitimate
surrogate for war in place of James' moral substitute, Frank Howard's
opinion that an impulse that Darwin finds as early as the sixth week and
hardly any student of childhood later than the sixth month, and which should
not be repressed but developed to its uttermost, although carefully directed
to worthy objects, are all in point. Howard pleads for judicious scolding
and flogging, to be, done in heat and not in cold blood, and says that there
is enough anger in the world, were it only rightly directed, to sweep away
all the evils in it. In all these phenomena there is no trace of sex or any
of its symbols, and sadism can never explain but must be explained by it. My
thesis is, then, that every Freudian mechanism applies to anger as truly as
it does to sex. This by no means assumes the fundamental identity of every
feeling-emotion in the sense of Weissfeld's very speculative theory.
In this very slight paper I am only trying to make the single point which I
think fear and sympathy or the gregarious or social instinct would still
better illustrate, although it would require more time, that the movement
inaugurated by Freud opens up a far larger field than that of sex. The
unconscious that introspectionists deny, (asserting that all phenomena
ascribed to it are only plain neural mechanisms, and therefore outside the
realm of psychology,) the feelings which introspection can confessedly never
tell much about and concerning which our text-books in psychology still say
so little: studies in these fields are marking a new epoch, and here the
chief merit of Freudism is found.