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There's a book by a female therapist who, in the name of feminism, admonishes her clients (and readers) to stop being nice. When you're angry, she says, just let it right out or you will channel your anger into overeating, overdrinking, skin disorders, colitis, or migraines. Late in her book, we learn where her data on psychosomatic symptoms come from:

What affected me most adversely as a girl was my family's illusion that nice girls (indeed, all nice people) didn't have and certainly didn't reveal hostile feelings. Although I was in many respects a normally nasty little girl, I always felt extremely guilty about my bad temper and "selfish" behavior. Only recently have I been able to experience my average nasty self without feeling that I must produce, along with the awareness of my hostility, punishments such as headaches, rashes, and fatness.

Then there is the male therapist who, in the name of men's liberation, likewise advises his clients to abandon niceness, no matter how difficult this is to do: "It requires a constant self-awareness and sensitivity to himself in order to avoid the temptation to be the 'nice guy' rather than to do what is real and true for himself," he writes:

As a general rule, put yourself first, except for those occasions when you genuinely want to make your wife's needs primary. Assume the risks of owning up to who you really are, completely and joyfully.

The author does not discuss what you should do if you are "really" a wife-abusing alcoholic, a supercilious prig, or an aggressive bully.

Freud would be appalled by these two characters: by their desire to behave like self-indulgent children with no responsibilities to others, no guilts about antisocial behavior, no restrictions on what they want to do. But they are a measure of how far our attitudes have come in a few decades, and they demonstrate the intimate connection between a culture's values and the popular advice that passes for scientific wisdom.

Therapies today differ in the solutions they recommend for people with "anger problems" (displacement, catharsis, fighting with foam-rubber bats, sports, rational problem-solving, years of analysis) and they have different theories about the causes of anger (accumulated energy, a crisis in infancy or childhood, years of resentment at one's mother). There are, of course, many sensible, practical therapists and therapies that can help people get through angry times in their lives, as I will be discussing.

But some of the descendants of Freud and Darwin have established schools of treatment based on the principle that anger, aggression's handmaiden, must not be blocked or silenced. Social psychologist Leonard Berkowitz calls advocates of this view "ventilationists," because they believe it is unhealthy to bottle up feelings. "Many go further," he writes, "and argue that if we could overcome our inhibitions and show our emotions, we would eliminate disturbing tensions, conquer nagging aches and pains, and promote 'deeper' and 'more meaningful' relationships with others." In the 1960s and 1970s, encounter groups adopted ventilationist therapies as vehicles for the let-it-out theory: William Schutz and Frederick (Fritz) Perls at Esalen, George Bach and Frederick Stoller in Los Angeles.

Lest you think that these are merely the weird fringes of psychology, dangling far from the mainstream, consider the arguments of psychoanalyst Theodore Isaac Rubin. In The Angry Book, Rubin warns us, without supporting data, of the familiar dangers that await those who bottle up their anger (or who "twist it" or "pervert it"). A "slush fund" of accumulated, unexpressed anger builds up in the body, just yearning for the chance to produce high blood pressure, disease, anxiety, depression, alcoholism, sexual problems, and the blahs. Rubin acknowledges that he has not measured the influence of this "slush fund" exactly (and concludes that it is "impossible" to do so), but this does not stop him from offering advice to his unknown readers. At the end of the book he provides a list of 103 rhetorical questions designed to give the reader therapeutic guidance:

Have you ever experienced the good, clean feel [sic] that comes after expressing anger, as well as the increased self-esteem and the feel of real peace with one's self and others?

(Actually, studies show that many people say that their self-esteem drops when they have let themselves express anger, that they feel depressed for several days, and that a gloomy pall envelops them. It depends on the situation and the object of their anger.)

Are you solidly aware that the purpose of warm, healthy anger is to deliver an affective (emotional) message in order to clear the air and to make corrections and reparations if necessary?

(Yes, and I'm also aware that corrections can be made without anger.)

When was the last time you got solidly angry? Did the world cave in?

(No, but sometimes it does. Some people get angry with positive results; others find that anger makes matters worse. It is misleading and naive to argue that all expressions of anger are beneficial.)

Are you aware that your anger will not kill anyone and that no one's anger will kill you?

(Yes, but only because I am a woman who has never been beaten by her husband or father. I imagine that thousands of battered wives in this country would have a far different response.)

Are you aware that people can feel loving and make love after a "fight" because an emotional traffic jam has been cleared?

(Those are other people, then, because most people report that they need time to cool down after a quarrel before they "feel loving" again. Besides, the trendy notion that fighting is sexy produces an association between sex and aggression that I, for one, find abhorrent.)

If you cannot extricate yourself from the slush-fund morass, are you wise enough to seek expert professional help? This means going to a psychiatrist who is a graduate of a psychoanalytic institute recognized by either The American Academy of Psychoanalysis or The American Psychoanalytic Association.

(No other form of therapy will do? Actually, studies find that cognitive-behavioral and family-systems therapies are demonstrably more effective than psychoanalysis in helping people control and manage angry feelings, learn constructive new anger habits, and break out of repetitive family banes.)

The ventilationist view is widespread not only among clinical psychologists and psychiatrists, but also among the general populace as well. For her book The Cycle of Violence, sociologist Suzanne K. Steinmetz studied the attitudes and experiences of typical families, and she found that a majority of adults endorse the catharsis notion. "This myth is widespread in both popular thinking and among certain social scientists," she wrote. "[For example, Bruno] Bettelheim suggests that the excessive training in self-control, typical of American middle-class families, denies the child outlets for the instinct of human violence and thereby fails to teach children how to deal with violent feelings."

But Steinmetz hardly found "excessive training in self-control" in the families she observed. Instead, she found a common belief among parents that it is better to spank a child than to restrain one's anger; that siblings should "fight it out" (even though parents hate it when they do); that screaming matches between husband and wife, and between parent and child, are normal, healthy, and good for the relationship. One father thought that the regular use of physical punishment "lets out the parent's frustration." One wife who used to be "very quiet" when she was angry said, "Now we get into loud discussions where I just get things out. It doesn't solve anything, but I do feel much better."

"I do feel much better." Is this what it comes to, then, the ultimate rationale for emotional release? Never mind whether your emotional release makes those around you feel worse, or fails to solve the problem. If you can do what you want, it must be good for you. That's the American way, after all.

The Use and Abuse of Anger

If anger is not only a biological reflex or an unconscious instinct, why has it persisted? One answer, I believe, is that anger survives because anger works. Preaching against it, like preaching against the other deadly sins, has not had much luck in the West. In America, the judicious application of a furious speech or a determined roar often gets the results that kindness, unfortunately, does not. Anger in America restores the sense of dignity and fair play ("I told that crook off good"), it feeds ambition and competitiveness ('I'll show the bastard how the job is done"), it asserts the individual in an anonymous world ("Listen to me").

But fair play, competitiveness, and individualism are by no means universal values. Try getting angry in front of an Utkuhikhalingmiut Eskimo, as anthropologist Jean Briggs did, and you will be ostracized for your childishness. Try demanding your rights in England, Japan, or Peru in the irate tone that would be effective at home, and you will be regarded as just another uncouth, noisy American. In highly cooperative small societies like the !Kung-san of Africa (the ! represents a click sound in their language), the provocations of anger that we take for granted — no, that we take for instinctive — are unknown. It is not that feelings of anger are unknown in such societies, rather that whether and how one acts on those feelings are managed by culture and by learning. The rules that govern anger do not spring arbitrarily from the brows of local shamans, witch doctors, and therapists; they serve their culture.

In some unspoken sense, most people understand this. In spite of certain gurus' admonitions to stop being nice, they know that niceness makes society possible. In spite of certain glowing promises that anger will make you feel good, they know that anger can be an uncomfortable emotion, for it means that something in your life is wrong. But this attitude is not bolstered by a society that praises aggressiveness, or rewards it tangibly when it condemns it verbally. We are ambivalent about anger not because of an "internal war" between reason and emotion; we are ambivalent about anger because sometimes it is effective and sometimes it is not, because sometimes it is necessary and sometimes it is destructive.

I dislike pop-psych approaches that persuade people that anger is buried "in them" because I think such notions are dangerous to the mental health of the participants and to the social health of the community. Such views get people ventilating and agitating, but they rarely recognize or fix the circumstances that make them angry in the first place. When Aesop's lion roared, no one thought the lion had a hostility complex or a problem with temper control; they knew a net had trapped him. No amount of chanting or shouting or pillow pounding will extricate us from the many nets of modern life.

Anger, therefore, is as much a political matter as a biological one. The decision to get angry has powerful consequences, whether anger is directed toward one's spouse or one's government. Spouses and governments know this. They know that anger is ultimately an emphatic message: Pay attention to me. I don't like what you are doing. Restore my pride. You're in my way. Danger. Give me justice.

As the Swami knew, anger is the human hiss.

Copyright © 1982, 1989 by Carol Tavris

Tags: Anger

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.