The Freudian Legacy

Anger : The Misunderstood Emotion
by Carol Tavris, Ph.D.

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Sitting in a café one afternoon, I overheard the following exchange between two women:

Woman A: "You'll feel better if you get your anger out."

Woman B: "Anger? Why am I angry?"

Woman A: "Because he left you, that's why."

Woman B: "Left me? What are you talking about? He died. He was an old man."

Woman A: "Yes, but to your unconscious it's no different from abandonment. Underneath, you are blaming him for not keeping his obligation to you to protect you forever."

Woman B: "That might have been true if I were ten years old, Margaret, but I'm forty-two, we both knew he was dying, and we had time to make our peace. I don't feel angry, I feel sad. I miss him. He was a darling father to me."

Woman A: "Why are you so defensive? Why are you denying your true feelings? Why are you afraid of therapy?"

Woman B: "Margaret, you are driving me crazy. I don't feel angry, dammit!"

Woman A (smiling): "So why are you shouting?"

It is not entirely easy to argue with a Freudian devotee, because disagreement is usually taken as denial or "blocking." If you do feel the emotion in question, you support the theory; and if you do not feel the emotion in question you also support the theory, because now you are demonstrating "reaction formation" or "repression." Such semantic contortions can themselves make one very cross.

We owe to Sigmund Freud, of course, the belief that our rational, conscious faculties do not know the half of what they are doing; that the unconscious, that seething cauldron of naughty instincts, guides so many of our feelings and actions. Freud regarded man as a creature at the mercy of his warring instincts — the innate conflict between love and hatred, life and death, sex and aggression — and he was pessimistic that the good side would win. Although Freud, like Darwin, regarded aggression as an ineradicable part of the human biological heritage, Freud emphasized the destructive, violent aspect of aggression, whereas Darwin saw aggression as self-defending and adaptive. Curiously, neither scientist paid much attention to anger. If they wrote about it at all, it was as a subcategory or weaker expression of the basic aggressive drive.

Yet, in the dark Freudian schema, so much unconscious rage and aggression! Everyone, at every age, is unwittingly furious with everyone else. Infants, for maternal abandonment. Toddlers, with the same-sexed parent who forbids incestuous lusts. Adolescents, for having to grow up and forgo childhood pleasures. Adults, for having to work and repress their instinctive passions. Freud penetrated the Victorian veneer of manners, to be sure; but, like prudes at a peep show, he was inclined to see more than was there.

Freud's theory and his language slowly filtered into the popular imagination through the writings and practice of psychoanalysts, but over the years Freud's disciples have diverged from the master's original arguments. In terms of the current thinking about anger, several of these discrepancies are significant:

The hydraulic model. Borrowing heavily from Hermann von Helmholtz's principle of the conservation of energy, Freud imagined that the libido was a finite amount of energy that powers our internal battles. If the energy is blocked here, it must find release there. As psychologist John Sabini put it: "Undischarged drives contribute their energy to the id, the reservoir of sexual and aggressive instincts. When the level has reached a critical point, overt aggression results." Freud chose all of his metaphors carefully, stating explicitly that although they were "incorrect," they were "useful aids to understanding" until the actual physiological mechanisms were discovered. Unhappily, many of Freud's followers confused metaphor with road map, and what was intended as a temporary concept assumed a life of its own.

Today the hydraulic model of energy has been scientifically discredited, but this has not stopped some therapeutic circles from expanding the "reservoir" idea to contain all the emotions — jealousy, grief, resentment, as well as rage. These therapists still argue that any feeling that is "dammed up" is dangerous, likely to "spill over" and possibly "flood" the system.

Catharsis. Freud and his collaborator Josef Breuer applied the catharsis idea specifically to aggression, using it to explain why, if we are all governed by violent instincts, relatively few of us were attacking each other on a daily basis. Catharsis, they suggested, empties the emotional reservoirs. Their definition was fairly casual: "The whole class of voluntary and involuntary reflexes — from tears to acts of revenge — in which, as experience shows us, the affects [emotions] are discharged." Actually, as experience was to show them, blubbering catharsis was not very effective therapy, and they later abandoned it for the talkier methods of psychoanalysis and conscious insight.

Today the catharsis question is with us again, but often with no better definition than Freud and Breuer had. Which elements of catharsis are essential to treatment and which are extraneous; for that matter, which are harmful? Some therapists imply that nearly all ways of "releasing" an emotion have equal therapeutic effect. Anger, for example, may be discharged by talking it out, shouting and hurling dishpans, exercising, playing football, watching a vigilante movie, throwing pillows, or plotting revenge. Freud and Breuer had used "catharsis" sparingly, but today it is nearly synonymous with emotional ventilation, "letting it all hang out."

Repression, sublimation, and guilt. Freud's use of these terms likewise was narrow and precise, but some popularizers broadened their meaning. "Repression," for example, came to refer not only to the process that keeps objectionable material from consciousness, but to a general (negative) state of keeping the lid on. "Sublimation" now covers not only the displacement of sexual energy into productive work, but also that of every other biological drive or impulse into unrelated activity.

Freud described repression as the pathogenic process that produces neurotic symptoms; psychoanalysis was designed to counteract these symptoms by bringing repressed material into consciousness. But he never argued that suppression of the instincts was undesirable. On the contrary: their suppression and redirection were necessary for the survival of the social system. Without repression, who would mind the store, build the bridges, create the Mona Lisa? Sublimation of sexual energy, while perhaps detrimental to the individual's wishes, served the greater good of society. And without guilt, the grease of civilization, hedonism would prevail. Society would disintegrate into anarchy.

Thus Freud was horrified by those who interpreted his descriptive statements as prescriptive, who wanted to expunge the controls of authority and guilt and "liberate" mind and body. "It is out of the question that part of the analytic treatment should consist of advice to 'live freely,'" he wrote, "if for no other reason because we ourselves tell you that a stubborn conflict is going on in the patient between libidinal desires and sexual repression, between sensual and ascetic tendencies. This conflict is not resolved by helping one side to win a victory over the other."

Yet that is exactly what many of Freud's successors attempted to do. Having decided that repression, sublimation, and guilt were merely Victorian cobwebs, they set out to sweep them away.

Copyright © 1982, 1989 by Carol Tavris

About the Author

Carol Tavris, Ph.D., earned her doctorate in social psychology from the University of Michigan. She was senior editor for several years of a then-new magazine, Psychology Today, and went on to develop a career as a teacher, lecturer, and psychology writer. She is coauthor (with Carole Wade) of The Longest War: Sex Differences in Perspective and an introductory textbook, Psychology. In addition to writing the "Mind Health" column for Vogue magazine, she has written many articles and book reviews on diverse issues in psychology for a wide variety of magazines, including The New York Times, Discover, Science Digest, Human Nature, New York, Harper's, Geo, Ms., Redbook, and Woman's Day. While living in New York, Tavris taught at the Human Relations Center of the New School for Social Research, and in Los Angeles she now teaches from time to time in the department of psychology at UCLA.