From Rage And Hatred To Irritation, Anger And Anger

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Outwardly, rage is a very strong affect, the observation of the manifestation of which evokes the fantasy of its destructiveness for the participants in the contact. However, rage serves the function of getting what you want within a confluent relationship. The destruction of the other and the relationship with him is not part of the plans of the person experiencing rage. Moreover, the emergence of this feeling is possible only in a relationship that is endowed by the individual with special significance. This distinctive feature of rage lies in the very etymology of this word - it comes from the Slavic verb "rage" (derived, apparently, from the name of the pagan god Yarila), which in Russian means "to get excited, to boil, and also to kindle a love desire", and in Ukrainian - "turn purple, angry, glow." The ancient root yar-, to which the name Yarila ascends, meant spring, as well as a state of love and readiness to produce offspring. The verb “rage” in some dialects of the Russian language means “lust, an agitated state during estrus in animals”, and in some Ukrainian dialects - “passion, ardor, amorous readiness” [5, 9].

So, despite the fact that from the outside, the manifestation of rage often looks threatening, it does not serve to destroy the object. This is the difference between the described affect and, for example, hatred aimed at destroying an object in the field. Hatred also appears as a fusion phenomenon, however, unlike rage, it does not imply a need for attachment. An individual's experience of rage or hatred dooms him to the impossibility of organizing contact with the environment, plunging deeper into confluence, which, in turn, at the slightest frustration, supports the process of the emergence and escalation of rage or hatred.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that rage serves the evolutionary (in the phylogenetic sense of human development as a biological species) and ontogenetically significant attempt to realize the earliest desires by the individual, marking the frustration of vital needs. The regulation by the individual of relations in the organism-environment field through the experience of rage turns out to be important at the stage when more mature mental mechanisms have not yet been formed. The tendency to isolate rage as the only available mechanism for regulating relationships in the field in an adult is a marker of self disorders, representing an ontogenetic and phylogenetic regression.

Irritation, anger, anger represent a later and, accordingly, more mature, both in the ontogenetic and in the phylogenetic sense, an attempt to regulate the process of contact in the field. In contrast to the methods of dealing with aggression already described above, these emotional phenomena are aimed not at maintaining symbiotic relationships, but at maintaining the border of the individual's contact with the environment. Irritation is the first preliminary attempt to signal an ongoing violation of the boundary of contact or the frustration of some needs. Anger performs the same task, differing only in the intensity of manifestation and the degree of readiness for action [2]. Anger, in turn, acts as a reaction to a threat situation. The described sequence corresponds to a creative adaptation in which irritation, anger and anger are markers of violation of the boundary of contact or frustration of any need. At the same time, the strength of the emerging affect in an individual is a derivative of the degree of aggression in relation to his boundaries or the importance of a frustrated need.

Despite the fact that these feelings perform an adaptive function, creatively organizing the contact of the individual in the field, they can also be important for the etiology of violations of creative adjustment. Thus, an individual can lose sensitivity to aggression from the environment and, as a result, become insensitive to his manifestations of aggression [3]. In this case, contact with emerging experiences can be interrupted through projection (forming fear), retroflection (in the form, for example, asthenia), deflection (in the form, for example, an excessive desire to please or please others), etc. Or the individual may be insensitive to the first signs of emerging aggression, realizing it only in the form of an excessive reaction of strong anger, which, due to its suddenness, can destroy contact, and sometimes relationships.

Noting the features of psychotherapy that correspond to the described phenomenology, one should pay attention to the differences in therapeutic approaches in situations determined by the presence of rage and anger, on the one hand, and more mature aggression - irritation, anger and anger, on the other [4]. In the first case, clients need a secure container for strong affects, absent from their previous life experience, to more or less safely accommodate rage and hatred. In this case, aggression can evolve to more mature contact forms only as a result of the conviction (arising from effective containment) that their strong affects are tolerable both for the therapist and for themselves. In the second case, therapeutic strategies should focus on maintaining the function of regulating the boundary of contact, which the emotional reactions of anger, irritation and anger are designed to perform. So, for example, one of the therapeutic tasks is to restore the client's sensitivity to aggression, both his own and from the environment. In the event that anger is the only possible form of expression of aggression, it is therapeutic to restore the ability to calibrate the irritation and anger that arise before this.