Part two of a conversation with Jungian analyst Murray Stein about the ways anger pervades our culture.

Like most young girls of my generation, I was raised to be kind, considerate, and quiet. The message was clear: anger was verboten and had to be squelched. Or else. Learning how to transform and transmute anger begins early and engages us throughout our lifetime. We may try to control anger, but in many instances, anger has a mind of its own. Anger combusts spontaneously. It arises on its own timetable and under its own conditions, sometimes for reasons our conscious minds can’t decipher.

Images of anger haunt our imagination. Visions of apocalyptic fires appear in our earliest literature. Myths and fables and folk tales serve as precautionary warnings that forces outside our control can throw down thunderbolts or cause villages to go up in flames.

How do we explain anger’s force and prevalence? How can we cope with its destabilizing energy?

In this second installment on anger, my guest, the distinguished Jungian analyst and acclaimed author, Dr. Murray Stein, expands our discussion: how anger is showing up in our inner and outer lives, and how, when examined closely, anger relates to feelings of vulnerability and despair.

Dale Kushner: Is the anger you are seeing in your patients related to their age? What do you think is causing this eruption of anger?

Murray Stein: I am seeing anger in patients of all ages. If they are young, they are angry about being denied the normal path to educational experiences because of the pandemic. If they are old, they are angry because of the insensitivity of the young about their vulnerability to COVID-19. And so forth. Anger is present in every age group and for similar or different reasons, some stimulated by the pandemic, some by the political conflicts raging in almost every country of the world, some by economic disadvantages and vulnerabilities. No age group is free of anger these days.

DK: Are there redeeming aspects of anger? What might they be?

MS: Anger can be the prelude to necessary change. It motivates one to act, and sometimes this is needed for development. Anger can lead to necessary changes in life if it is channeled in a direction that is constructive in the long term. A battered woman in an abusive relationship who uses her anger to change her situation is for the good and in the interest of individuation if it leads to greater consciousness and self-affirmation. As a psychotherapist, I am pleased when a depressed and passive client becomes angry and stands up for herself. Anger can serve the goals of psychological development and individuation. It demands that things change.

DK: What is the value of dreaming about anger? Is it cathartic? Does dreaming about anger help a person process it?

MS: Dreaming about anger means that it is becoming conscious. Anger can simmer under the surface, on the fringes of consciousness. In the dream, it erupts. This signals the emotion is becoming conscious and can be felt and processed. Anger in a dream is anger on its way to consciousness, and once conscious it can be worked with and does not get expressed by acting out.

DK: What myths or fairy tales instruct us about anger?

MS: We can learn a lot from myth about the impersonal psychic forces that can take possession of our conscious selves, individually and collectively. For instance, in Greek myth, the chthonic Alecto, whose name means “unceasing in anger,” is a Fury conceived by Gaia when the semen from Ouranos was spilled into her when their son, Kronos, castrated his father. Alecto lives in the underworld and can be summoned to action, sometimes in service of justice for moral crimes committed and sometimes simply to instigate violent anger on behalf of a political cause. In the Aeneid, she is sent by Juno to stir up furious anger in the Latins against the invading Trojans. In the narrative, you see how Alecto (relentless anger) invades and takes possession of humans and drives them to action that we would judge to be insane. She enters the body of the Latin Queen Amata who incites the Latin women to riot against the invaders. Then she enters the body of Juno’s priestess, Calybe, and proceeds to incite King Turnus to go on a rampage against the allies of the Trojans and slaughter at random to the point of absolute exhaustion.  Virgil’s great epic tells the story of angry heroes battling over territory and the subsequent founding of Rome by the victor, Pius Aeneas. The Trojan hero stakes his claim in Italy at the command of the high god, Jove, and Venus, his mother. They tell him it is his destiny and he must not settle for less than their ambition for him and his Trojan survivors from the fall of Troy.

The poem is generally seen as a celebration of Emperor Augustus and the establishment of the Roman Empire, but it is also a moral critique. Anger permeates the epic from start to finish, and the final climactic lines reflect the overall tone. It is a scene on the battlefield; Aeneas is standing over the wounded Turnus, who is begging for his life. I quote the closing lines in the fine new translation by Shadi Bartsch:

Aeneas drank in this reminder of his savage

grief. Ablaze with rage, awful in anger, he cried,

“Should I let you slip away, wearing what you

tore from one I loved? Pallas sacrifices

you, Pallas punishes your profane blood” – and,

seething, planted his sword in that hostile heart.

Turnus’ knees buckled with chill. His soul fled

with a groan of protest to the shades below.

 

From The Aeneid by Vergil, translated by Shadi Bartsch (Random House, 2021)

This is the end of the epic, and a bloody and angry ending it is. Empires are founded on such.

DK: Is there anything in popular Western culture that gives us remedial lessons about anger?

MS: In Jungian psychology, we try to bring opposites in contact with each other and wait for a uniting symbol to bring them together. What is the opposite of anger? In the Western tradition, its opposite is peace. In popular culture, there are many songs, films, TV shows, etc. that promote peace. They suggest putting anger aside and making peace. “Make love, not war” was a popular slogan in the sixties during the protests against the American war in Vietnam. The problem is you have to want to choose peace over anger, which usually also means giving up the desire for power over the other. If there is injustice afoot, it is not easy to choose peace. Alecto may be summoned and stir up rage in an injured individual or population. The natural response to injustice is to become angry and to fight for change. But there is another response to injustice, which the Quakers in America are known for with their efforts to cultivate peace even while being activists for social justice. They attempt to combine anger and peace in their protests and messages. Some individuals have found a way to contain anger and use it to fuel the peace movement. Others, of course, sink into depression and resignation.

DK: How did Jung think about anger? Did he relegate it to the shadow aspect?

MS: Jung reflected on the topic of anger as born of inferiority and resentment in his essay “Wotan,” where he writes about the social and political climate in Germany in the 1930s. He himself had a fiery temper and would occasionally lash out in angry outbursts toward opponents and critics. I think he would say anger was part of his shadow, which at times he could channel to constructive ends and at times not. Barbara Hannah claimed that when Jung would get angry at her it was also meant to teach her something and came as a lesson for improvement. She may have been rationalizing a bit. Basically, Jung would say that if you are possessed by an emotion like anger to such a degree that you lose control of your judgment, you have been taken over by a complex or archetypal energy. On a collective level, this archetypal energy is symbolized by mythical figures like Wotan or Ares/Mars. Entire masses can become possessed by these archetypal energies, and then you have warfare.

DK: To what degree do you think social media fuels or contributes to personal anger?

MS: Social media pours fuel on the fires that are already burning. A person is somewhat anxious and then gets messages that confirm the fears she is already feeling. This leads to angry responses, and the ball gets rolling. Social media intensifies the emotional tone of the times. I don’t think the answer is to cancel the media or ask them to tone it down. A better answer is to have leaders who show a better way forward. Social media is a follower, not a leader.

Read Part One of this interview, “Murray Stein on the Eruption of Anger in Today’s World.”

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 

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One of Carl Jung’s most haunting statements: What we do not make conscious appears to us as Fate. We may sometimes call an outside event like an illness or an accident “fate.” Jung’s great insight, however, was to recognize that what “happens to us” is intimately connected to what is going on inside and that only by turning inward and exploring the hidden aspects of ourselves, our shadow parts, might we gain a deeper knowledge of who we are and attain a sense of agency about our destiny.

When I asked renowned psychoanalyst and Jungian scholar Murray Stein what he’d like to discuss together here, he didn’t hesitate: “Anger.” Anger is one of the emotions that often remains unconscious, in our shadow, as Jung might say. But in today’s world, unprocessed and unrecognized anger, and its destructive buddy, violence, is rocking the foundational supports of individuals and nations.

How are we to process this powerful force, personally and as a species? I can think of no better person to illuminate how inextricably connected the inner and outer worlds of anger are than my dear friend and mentor, Murray Stein. Murray’s perspective comes from his scholarly investigations of Jung and from his past role as president of The International Association for Analytic Psychology as well as being a clinician and teaching analyst in Zurich with an international following. I’m delighted to introduce you to his work. This will be the first in a series of two interviews with Dr. Stein.

Dale Kushner: What is the difference between anger, rage, and aggression? Is it important we understand the difference?

Murray Stein: Anger has many degrees of heat. Rage is the highest. It is red hot, burning, emotion in uncontrollable flames. Aggression is action sometimes taken as the result of anger, or rage, and sometimes not. Aggression can be quite cold-blooded and calculating as we see in the strategic moves of chess players and politicians. Anger and rage disrupt clear thinking and so are not much in evidence if aggression is carried out for strategic purposes. Of course, anger might be behind the strategic moves of aggression as a fundamental motivation for acts of calculated aggression, like the raging dictator ordering his rational military to go to all-out war.

DK: Are you now encountering more dreams about anger in your practice and among your students?

MS: The short answer is “yes.” We know that anger is one of the basic emotions and is always with us as a species. However, it seems to be an exceptionally predominant emotion throughout the world nowadays. It’s as though the entire human population has become choleric, edgy, quick to anger. This hot emotion rises fast and furious in families, boils up in social and professional circles, infects political arguments, and rages on the roads and highways. And yes, anger even erupts among Jungian students in the classroom over issues like wearing the mask or not. We live in a world where splitting energy is rampant everywhere. It feeds on divisions and fuels hatred of the perceived “other.” Dreams sometimes reflect the emotionality of the awake mind, and sometimes not.

DK: Are similar images or themes appearing?

MS: A related theme is vulnerability and victimization. This comes up frequently in dreams. Dreamers find themselves in dangerous situations and have to make decisions that could prove life-threatening or life-saving. I haven’t made a statistical study of the frequency, but my guess would be that dreams of vulnerability – to oneself, to a child or loved one – have increased during the Pandemic.

DK: How do these more recent dreams of anger differ from anger dreams you saw earlier in your practice?

MS: Maybe I’m just more sensitive to the issue of anger now, but these more recent dreams of anger do seem exceptionally intense. I personally had a dream recently in which I became angrier than I can remember ever being. A brief summary of the dream: a man carelessly ignited a fire that nearly destroyed the building I was in and then nonchalantly refused to take responsibility for his action. I flew into a rage at him. It was his lack of accepting responsibility for the fire that made me so angry, more than the fact of the fire itself. When I woke up from this dream, it took me some time to cool down. I immediately associated the irresponsible individual with a notorious politician who will go unnamed.

DK: How is anger manifesting in your patients’ lives? Would you say it is related to the current collective global turbulence?

MS: I hear accounts regularly of anger flare-ups in their lives. Sometimes it is at home – for example, a mother of a young child who can’t go to school and is overwhelmed by her responsibilities toward her child, her work, her husband. Anger flares quickly and without much immediate cause in this circumstance. It’s simmering constantly in the background and flares up at the slightest provocation. This is not her usual pattern.  Another instance is a father who becomes furious with his grown daughter because she voted for the other political party and he now refuses to speak to her. Sometimes it is in the online work situation – short tempers flare because of distance and poor communications among the members of a team. I get the feeling that Ares, the angry god of war, is taking over as the dominant archetypal energy of the times. Everyone seems ready to go to war at a moment’s notice and often with the thrill and pleasure associated with the war-monger god.

DK: Does anger seem more prevalent in this decade than previous ones you’ve practiced in?

MS: Yes. More precisely, in the last five years, since the manifestation of political divisions between left and right have sharpened worldwide, and also the economic disparities between the ultra-rich and the rest have become intolerable, and then also since the Pandemic has generated its dynamics of tension and anger. The patients I see are subject to all of these collective stresses, and we have to deal with them in the sessions of psychotherapy while also of course dealing with their particular issues from their personal life histories. The collective tensions come into dreams and personal relationships. We are all embedded in the collective and cannot avoid the emotions that collective issues generate in the people around us.

DK: What are the consequences of personal and collective anger?

MS: As I said above, the consequences are both destructive and creative. James Hillman, who was an astrological Ares, once said that he could not write if he was not angry. Anger motivated him to create. In other cases, anger results in rubble and ruin, of individuals and civilizations. The splitting energy that we see rampant in the world today might be the harbinger of a new civilization in the making beyond the angry present, or it might be nothing more than a signal that the present systems of organizing human society are broken beyond repair.

DK: What guidance might you suggest to populations overwhelmed by righteous anger?

MS: Righteous anger is still anger, and it can become so powerful and convincing that one could speak of possession. Jung defined psychosis as a state of possession by archetypal energies. In this condition, you say and do things that are not balanced. Fueled by righteous anger, they can lead to committing acts as unjust as the injustices you are protesting against in your righteousness. My suggestion would be to hold on to your thinking and feeling functions, that is, to your capacity to think rationally and to follow the guidance of your best values. If you lose contact with these functions, you are in trouble and in danger of possession. The expression of this usually leads to backlash and retribution, so not to a good result if you think about it. However, righteous anger must be expressed or it will turn to bitterness and hatred. It’s a question of how to express this type of anger. The form is important. My suggestion is to express the anger but not to let the anger per se take control of your actions.

DK: What would be a positive way to mitigate collective anger?

MS: Leadership! The anger must be heard, and there must be a response from collective leadership that gives hope of remediation. Then action. Words are not enough.

DK: Are there other extreme emotions being expressed more often in this decade (in America)? Positive or negative.

MS: It’s hard to say. Maybe despair. This has been a time of what I’ve called umbra mundi, the shadowed world, as though we’ve been living in a longtime eclipse of the sun and moon. It’s a dark time, and in this global mood, the dominant emotions have been anger and despair, in my experience. At the same time, there are moments of hope and vision and determination to make things different. I think we are emerging into an era of activism when the vast majority of conscious individuals will put their energies into remedial efforts to restore human values and repair the global environment.

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 

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Here’s a story my friend and acclaimed Buddhist author Sharon Salzberg tells. Years ago, as a young woman, she traveled to India to study meditation. One of her teachers lived in Calcutta. After finishing her time with Dipa Ma, Sharon planned to get on a train to visit another teacher who lived in a different part of India. With a friend, she hired a rickshaw to get to the train station. However, on the way there, the driver took a shortcut through a back alley and a man leaped out of the shadows to grab at Sharon and tried to pull her out of the cart. Luckily, her friend pushed the man away, and the two women escaped unharmed. When she arrived at her teacher’s place, Sharon related her experience. His response went something like this:  “With all the loving-kindness in your heart, you should have used your umbrella and hit the man over the head.”

As with most Buddhist teaching tales, we can draw various lessons from this story. One is that we often feel conflicted about how to act in adverse situations. When fear or anger, grief or worry take over, confusion, paralysis, indecision, and a desire to escape can occur. Women especially are conditioned to acquiesce to the societal norms of “good behavior” and ignore prompts to respond assertively against injury. Strong emotions can cloud anyone’s mind. Meeting violence in any form, whether it comes toward oneself from within or from another, requires wise and skillful action. This is not our intuitive response. Reacting in a habitual and conditioned way is.

The key word in the teacher’s advice is loving-kindness. Knowing Sharon had suffered from a disturbing event, he was encouraging her to hold herself with loving-kindness, but also to have compassion for the perpetrator, a victim of injustice and poverty. The unfortunate conditions of the attacker’s life, however, are not excuses for his hurtful actions. Skillful or right action includes moral conduct. When we decide to take action, are we aware of the ethical dimensions of our actions? What is our motivating force? Are we attached to specific outcomes? Are we doing harm—with a look, a harsh word, with indifferent or malicious behavior? How can we become more conscious of how we affect others and ourselves?

I recently thought of the umbrella story after our house was robbed while my husband and I were asleep. Not even our usually alert pooch that barks at every squirrel in the neighborhood woke up. My initial reaction to the burglary was fear, violation, and anger. The anger soon dissipated, but the fear lingered. As I observed my mind getting caught in the dukkha, the Pãli word for suffering, I saw that the fear had its roots in a sense of helplessness, disappointment, and a damaged sense of safety. Jeesh, even my beloved doggie let me down! For days, I struggled with alternating big emotions, but when I looked deeper, I saw that the need to feel safe had long been a core issue in my life.

To break patterns of reactivity requires we cultivate an awareness of our mind’s biases and preoccupations. Renowned teacher Pema Chödrön states: “The Sanskrit word klesha refers to a strong emotion that reliably leads to suffering. It’s sometimes translated as “neurosis” and as “afflictions” and “defiled emotions.” In essence, kleshas are dynamic, ineffable energy, yet their energy can easily enslave us and cause us to act and speak in unintelligent ways.

Our lives give us plenty of opportunities to work with kleshas. “Learning takes place only in a mind that is innocent and vulnerable,” wrote the Indian philosopher Krishnamurti. I find his words highly comforting. They take the sting out of the shame of vulnerability. They remind me that a tender and unblemished part exists in all of us. Just think of it— every moment we are alive is a brand new moment, a chance to take a fresh breath and begin again. When strong feelings sweep us up, when we are caught in a craving or are numbing out, we can pause, go inward and pay attention to our breath. We can ask ourselves with open curiosity: What’s here? Is it fear, sorrow, frustration, rage? What is asking for my attention? No matter what we have experienced, no matter how troublesome our circumstances, we can meet it with a mind unbound from past patterns.

Let me offer a simple strategy for staying mindful. As I like to joke, we have to be mindful to remember to be mindful!

Several Buddhist teachers encourage a practice with the acronym RAIN that is helpful in stabilizing the mind and directing our awareness to our deep truth. According to teacher Tara Brach, RAIN is a four-step process that can be accessed in almost any situation. She writes: “RAIN directly de-conditions the habitual ways in which you resist your moment-to-moment experience. It doesn’t matter whether you resist “what is” by lashing out in anger, by having a cigarette, or by getting immersed in obsessive thinking. Your attempt to control the life within and around you actually cuts you off from your own heart.”

The easily remembered steps to RAIN are:

R—Recognition
A—Acceptance
I—Investigation
N—Non-identification

Recognition

The willingness to recognize what is happening in your life right here, right now is the first step to mindfulness. It involves focusing your attention on all that is happening within you, your thoughts, emotions, feelings, sensations. Some of us find it easier to notice our cold fingertips and racing heart than our racing thoughts. Start wherever you can focus, the tightness in your chest or the words repeating in your head; wherever you start, attend to yourself with curiosity and without judgment.

Acceptance

Can you allow what’s occurring in the moment to just be? It’s completely natural to want to push away difficult thoughts, feelings or sensations and resist unpleasantness in all forms. The teachings tell us that when we soften and open to whatever is happening, our level of ease and comfort actually increase. A phrase that’s often helpful in making space for the unwanted is the accepting acknowledgment: And this, too.

Investigate

Tara calls this step, “investigating with kindness.” She encourages us to ask ourselves the questions, “What is happening inside me right now?” What am I believing?” “What does this feeling want from me?” We may ask ourselves what judgment are we holding about a situation. Beneath the judgment, what else can be discovered?

Non-Identification

When we identify with our thoughts, stories, or emotions, when we say to ourselves, I am an anxious, or greedy, or angry person, we limit our view of who we really are, and ignore our vast and wise “Buddha” nature. Non-identification means we acknowledge that we are not our thoughts or emotions and that our emotions are not unique to us. When we live in our larger selves, we are freed from the constrictions of our limited minds.

The American essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson urged us to be “active souls.” An active soul is an inquiring soul, a soul participating in the world. By claiming our full human experience—life as it is, not as we wish it to be, and accepting things as they are—our closed-off hearts break open in recognition of our common plight with all beings. We understand that our existence on the planet, no less than the existence of the planet itself, depends on the comprehension of our interconnectedness. The personal is universal; by befriending our individual minds and hearts with genuine curiosity and non-judgment, we contact our essential goodness and intelligence. With greater ease, we naturally lift out of despair and hopelessness and discover new energy for our role in planetary well-being.

Several days after the robbery, I had a realization that in a world of haves and have-nots, stealing will inevitably occur. This understanding lessened my sense of personal injury and softened my attitude toward the thieves. The thought came to me while sitting in meditation and arose as a deep insight about the world. I have not dwelt on the fate of the thieves or tried to imagine them, but when they come to mind, without trying to push anything away, I feel no trace of bitterness.

And here’s a PS to consider about the umbrella story. As the teacher advises: If with the intention of compassion and loving-kindness, we stop our attacker by hitting him on the head, we prevent him from accumulating bad karma from an unwholesome deed!

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 

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