Concept of Anger as a Healthy Emotion

Carol Tavris, in her work Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion, essentially attempts to reclaim anger as a healthy rather an unhealthy emotion, and to show how it can be experienced and expressed in ways which will not be destructive to the individual or to others. Tavris attempts as well to come to a clearer definition of anger than has been forged to date in the field of psychology:

Clinicians devote a considerable portion of their energies to helping their clients "deal" with anger, yet few of them distinguish anger from rage, hatred, violence, or chronic resentment, and even fewer conduct experiments to see how these phenomena might differ (23).

As a result of these flawed perceptions and definitions, and the dominance of psychology in determining our understanding of anger and its proper place in a healthy life, a number of deeply entrenched myths have emerged. Two of the most important and most misleading are the assumptions that "anger and aggression are inextricably, biologically linked; anger is the feeling and aggression its overt expression," and "if the outward expression of anger is blocked, anger 'turns inward,' where you feel it as depression, guilt, shame, anxiety, or lethargy" (24).

In other words, there are numerous myths which have sprung up around the "misunderstood emotion" of anger and which prevent us from truly appreciating what the experience and expression of anger can do to make our lives more satisfying and authentic.

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ivens in this society about anger, and she seeks to examine those givens in order to resurrect a healthy relationship between that emotion and human beings: I believe that a careful study of anger matters because anger, like love, has such a potent capacity for good and evil. . . . Anger, like love, is a moral emotion. I have watched people use anger in . . . years of spiteful hatred. And I watch . . . those who use anger to probe for truth. . . . In the last several decades, biology and psychology have deprived anger . . . of the human capacity for choice and control. My aim here, in evaluating and criticizing the prevailing wisdom, is to help restore confidence in those human gifts (25). Tavris has written a book designed to have the reader rely not on the authority of experts, but on the reader's own intuition, insight and experience with respect to the emotion of anger. The lazy reader who wants to have his or her work done for him or her by the author or the experts will be disappointed. Tavris' book requires full reader participation, intellectually, experientially, and emotionally. Tavris' focus on the women's movement is designed to show the constructive, creative and healthy role which anger played in the evolution of

Category: Psychology - C