At my local post office they sell a wide variety of packaging. You bring your bundle along and pick up a flat-pack box retailing at around £6.99. You pay for the box: then they construct it for you, and watch you as you place your items inside. But when it comes to sealing it – the very last stage of the process before posting – they won’t let you use the Sellotape that is lying next to them on the counter. They point to a rack across the room and explain that they sell rolls of Sellotape for £2.99. At this point you are faced with increasing the price of your shipping by 50 per cent or struggling all the way home with your bundle to tape it up yourself and then bring it back to the very same person who sent you away.
Every time I go through this deeply humiliating process – whenever I forget to pack my personal roll of Sellotape – I have a reaction grossly out of proportion to the issue itself. I feel a cold infusion of cortisol through my bloodstream and my heart contracts with pain. My thigh muscles stiffen, pushing out my bottom like a toddler about to scream, and I have a vivid image – irrespective of whoever is serving me – of reaching into their head, pulling out their eyes, stretching them to the full extent of their ligaments and then letting them snap back hard into their skull. The Freudian analyst Josh Cohen would call this a revenge fantasy, a key feature of impotent rage.
Several big, rather unfortunate things happened to me in short succession the other day, but the only thing that made me angry was the Sellotape. “Jobsworth” behaviour feels, ironically, so personal: the decision of a complete stranger to deny you what you need. In polite society, most anger is impotent, working its way on the nerves. “Life is constantly serving up rude reminders of our powerlessness and inadequacy in the face of larger forces,” says Cohen. It starts at birth, with the first howl of rage, and it continues through infancy, as we learn that the world does not bend to our demands. It rears its head at key stages of our life – in adolescence, and later in older age, when our power in the outside world declines. My father, always so mild-mannered, is now an angry letter writer should he visit a National Trust property and find some of the rooms closed without proper explanation.
Josh Cohen, bemused, as a young boy, by the “divine red mist” of the Old Testament God, has spent years thinking about anger, and he distinguishes between four types: righteous, failed, cynical and “usable”. Sadness and regret are such simple emotions but anger is as complex as love, because we “fall” into it: “The combustion of rage is a kind of trauma in the strict sense of an experience whose sheer force is too much for us to master.” Rage “puts the self under siege”: though we generally associate it with aggression and its effect on others, when we are angry, we are primarily attacking ourselves.
Cohen, a psychoanalyst and academic, is interested in transforming the self-righteous, howling ouroboros rage of social media trolls, incels and racists into something conscious and personal. To “sit” with a feeling is the recommendation of any psychoanalyst, and therapists sit with angry people all day. But anger is hard to love. Only when seen as a state of possession, rather than simply an “agitated expression of a belief”, can it be fully understood.
When I was a young child, my tantrums took a particular form: I’d bang my head into the wall whenever I felt that my parents were misunderstanding, or misrepresenting, what I’d said or who I was. In those moments I was caught in a maddening split between my reality and theirs: it was as though I was trying to act out that split by splitting my head. In one of Cohen’s patient case studies – always the most fascinating part of any book by a therapist – the patient describes him, sneeringly, as “one of those postmodern literary types who thinks truth is all a matter of perspective”. Indeed, he does see all sides to a story: an incel’s anger is the same anger, to him, as a #MeToo victim’s. The problem with the internet is that it has become a crucible for unexamined feelings: “It’s surely at the moment anger feels most right that it becomes most dangerous, because it is most likely to seal itself tightly into its own self-certainty.”
Male rage features heavily in Cohen’s book, because men are more likely to be conditioned by patriarchal imperatives and to reject the feminine (by which Freud, in 1930s-speak, meant an ability to give oneself up to the full range of emotional and bodily experiences). Elliot Rodger, the smooth and self-pitying narcissist who made videos from his car bemoaning his virginity before going on a killing spree in California, flipped his need for the love of women into hatred for them. He quickly became a role model for subsequent attackers. While revolutionary leaders have historically tapped in to what Cohen thinks of as a choate centre of “banked” rage and social grievance, the internet encourages a dispersal of anger without a shared project. A collision of contradictory facts leads to a dispersed inner life, and to “mutual cancellation from inside a self-confirming echo chamber”: millions of isolated people in their own realities, figuratively banging their heads into walls.
Anger at climate change remains equally diffuse, while half the population is unable to face their fear of the planet’s destruction; Greta Thunberg and her peers have – I found this moving – a “Telemachus complex”, holding off the attacks on Ithaca while looking over the horizon to the parents “who have gone quiet or missing while the planetary home is ransacked”.
This is a strangely repetitive book, returning to one particular case study – Freud’s account of a beaten employee, a powerful illustration of impotent rage – so often that it acquires the tone of an extended lecture. There are long literary examples, such as an eight-page reflection on Anthony Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right that you’ll skip if you haven’t read the book. There is an exploration of the Senecan idea – so 45 BC! – that anger is something to be hidden, in order to gain power. Yet this idea is still at the heart of the workplace, and Cohen, whose books include Not Working: Why We Have to Stop (2019), is brilliant on passive aggression, the scourge of the office and the destroyer of the home. He made me think about it in a whole new way: that passive aggression is often unconscious, and employed by people fearing conflict. How refreshing to think of that loaded silence or ghosted text, which feel so calculated and controlling, as someone trying to deal with anger towards you that they don’t want to have.
Cohen considers Trump, and Trump’s supporters, alongside an astonishing story of therapeutic malpractice in New York. Over the course of many years, the renowned Freudian psychoanalyst Isaac Herschkopf took over the life of his vulnerable client Marty Markowitz: he became a proxy father figure, exploiting Markowitz’s anger at his family members until all contacts with them were severed, then moved into his house like a giant human cuckoo, with Markowitz working as his handyman. Trump, too, exploits the anger of his followers – a “diffuse” rage, clouding personal stories and hardships – and stokes their insecurities, while promising, with expert vagueness, that he has come to “sort everything out”.
The path to “usable” rage, Cohen thinks, is through introspection – a somatic relationship with one’s anger, because so often what lies underneath is hurt, pain, sadness and humiliation: “a rich but disavowed personal history of feeling”. An angry person is one who cannot bear the weight of their unmet needs: unless rage is transformed it will transfer itself from object to object, driving a subject’s life, and we all know at least one person like that. You end the book wondering how that might be achieved. Free state-funded therapy for everyone on planet Earth? It’s not a bad idea.
All the Rage: Why Anger Drives the World
Josh Cohen
Granta, 256pp, £16.99
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This article appears in the 07 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Trump takes America