Josh Cohen - The force of anger

Anger is a primordial emotion and appears across cultures as a formative force.

About Josh Cohen "I’m a psychoanalyst in private practice in London and Professor of Modern Literary Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London.

My research is at the borders of psychoanalysis, literature and cultural theory. I’ve written a number of books, including one on Sigmund Freud, on privacy, on our aversion to work and, most recently, on the relationship between literature and life."

Key Points

• Anger is a primordial emotion and appears across cultures as a formative force. • Freud and Breuer believed that the traumas that trouble our mental lives are caused by psychic injuries, which often lead to a lodged anger at the centre of the self. • Addressing such anger requires a thoughtful, just response; it cannot be dealt with through quick fixes like shouting or receiving an apology.   A primordial emotion

Anger is a main colour on the spectrum of human feeling. It’s one of the most primordial emotions. It involves the presence of at least one other person: a sense of injury that someone else has done us which makes us feel like we want to retaliate, to avenge ourselves. It’s one of the most venerable of human emotions, and one that is attested to across different cultures very early on.

We see anger in all the mythological traditions, in various cosmogonies and theogonies. The Greek gods, the Indian gods, various systems of the divine show us that in the creation of the world, in the creation of the people who make up the world, anger is always a formative force.

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