THE JOURNAL OF ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY
ANGER AS A PRIMARY EMOTION, AND THE
APPLICATION OF FREUDIAN MECHANISMS
TO ITS PHENOMENA[1]
BY G. STANLEY HALL
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.
[[1]]
Read at a meeting of the American Psychopathological Association,
New York City, May 5, 1915.