I. Anger has many modes of Verschiebung, both instinctive and cultivated.
One case in our returns carries a bit of wood in his vest-pocket and bites
it when he begins to feel the aura of temper. Girls often play the piano
loudly, and some think best of all. One plays a particular piece to divert
anger, viz., the "Devil's Sonata." A man goes down cellar and saws wood,
which he keeps for such occasions. A boy pounds a resonant eavespout. One
throws a heavy stone against a white rock. Many go off by themselves and
indulge in the luxury of expressions they want none to hear. Others take out
their tantrum on the dog or cat or perhaps a younger child, or implicate
some absent enemy, while others curse. A few wound themselves, and so on,
till it almost seems, in view of this long list of vicariates, as if almost
any attack, psychic or physical, might thus be intensified, and almost
anything or person be made the object of passion. Be it remembered, too,
that not a few look, do, think, feel their best under this impulsion.
II. Besides these modes of Abreagierung there are countless forms of
sublimation. In anger a boy says: I will avenge myself on the bully who
whipped me and whom I cannot or will not whip, by besting him in his
studies, class-work, composition, or learn skilful stunts that he cannot do,
dress, or behave better, use better language, keep better company, and thus
find my triumph and revenge. A man rejected or scorned by a woman sometimes
makes a great man of himself, with the motivation more or less developed to
make her sorry or humiliated. Anger may prompt a man to go in to win his
enemy's girl. A taunt or an insult sometimes spurs the victim of it to
towering ambition to show the world and especially the abuser better, and to
be able to despise him in return; and there are those who have been thus
stung to attempt greatness and find the sweetest joy of success in the
feeling that by attaining it they compensate for indignities they suffered
in youth. In fact, when we analyze ambition and the horror of
Minderwertigkeit that goes with it, we shall doubtless find this factor is
never entirely absent, while if we were to apply the same pertinacity and
subtlety that Jung in his "Wandlungen" has brought to bear in working over
the treacherous material of mythology, we might prove with no less
verisimilitude than he has shown the primacy of the libido that in the
beginning was anger, and that not Anaxagoras' love or the strife of
Heraclitus was the fons et origo of all things, that the Ichtrieb is basal,
and that the fondest and most comprehensive of all motives is that to excel
others, not merely to survive, but to win a larger place in the sun, and
that there is some connection between the Darwinian psychogenesis and Max
Stirner and Nietzsche, which Adler has best evaluated.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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