Transcription
What should we do when we feel angry? Should we act it out? Should we distract ourselves, repress it? This has been a big question in parenting, in psychotherapy, even in pop culture. You may have heard of this study where people were encouraged to punch a punching bag while thinking of someone who made them angry. At least I know that I learned about this study at university. The question is, did it help? And no, actually it made people more aggressive. Researchers concluded for reducing anger, the worst advice is to tell people to imagine their provocator's face on a punching bag. And yet that is exactly what many pop psychologists suggests.
We will come back to this study later. But a question we can already ask is why does acting out the anger not help or not help in this instant? And is there maybe more nuance to this? And to answer this question, I would like to call upon the help and genius of Anna Freud and her concept of the identification with the aggressor.
Anna Freud was Ziggman Freud's youngest daughter and a very innovative and influential psychoanalyst in her own right. I mean talk about stepping out of the shadow of a famous parental figure. She definitely made that happen. Their relationship was very close, very intimate, very special. She was analyzed by her father, something that would be unthinkable today. And in her own work, she focused on the psychonalysis of children and studying the ego's defense mechanisms, which made her one of the most important contributors to the school of ego psychology.
If you remember, Freud had developed the structural model of the psyche with the id, the ego, and the super ego. And he was much more preoccupied with a conflict between the id and the superego between wishes, desires and moral or societal demands, expectations. Ego psychology now looks much more at the ego. What are the abilities of the ego? How does the ego deal with reality which is much more about understanding developmental deficits rather than inner conflicts between you know for example the id and the super ego.
And in her book the ego and mechanisms of defense from 1936 um I have the German version here but you can get the English one as well. She laid out the ways in which the ego protects itself from internal and external threats. And one of her most famous contribution is identification with the aggressor. And actually it's um a short and sweet chapter of only 12 pages. So if you want to read it yourself, it is more accessible than you might think.
First of all, identification with the aggressor is a defense mechanism. We use defense mechanisms to reduce anxiety or other experiences that are not pleasurable which is a very important function. There's another psychoanalyst Leon Vuomza a Swiss psychoanalyst and he described defense mechanisms in his book the mask of shame as different ways of saying no to the truth which is beautiful and also hints at the cost of those mechanisms. And identification is a very complex defense mechanism that can be used to defend both against threats from the outside as well as threats from within.
When it comes to threats from within, which might be impulses, wishes, memories, anything we deem dangerous, identification is used to build up the super ego. We identify with our parents and change ourselves in their image. Identification then means I am just as kind, powerful, intelligent, ambitious, altruistic, whatever as you are. And therefore, I don't steal. I don't hit my sibling even though I really want to. I don't cheat on my partner. Identification is used to build up the super ego and therefore defense against what was called libidinal drives.
And before that, it's also one of the most important ways to deal with frightening people in reality. Anna Freud observed the children she had in analysis who were afraid of someone transformed that fear into safety and control by identifying with the aggressor. I am just as scary, aggressive, masculine, powerful as you. This could take different forms. either, you know, they imitate facial expressions or mannerisms of the aggressor, or two, they identify with the aggression, meaning they only act out the aggression without depicting the aggressor as such. Or number three, they identify with the masculinity and, you know, maybe the child comes to the session all dressed up as a military man. Either way, what happened was that those kids turned passivity into activity. They turned themselves from a victim into the perpetrator.
The defense of identifying with the aggressor is not just a response to immediate criticism or aggression. It is also used prophylactically. If a little boy comes home late from playing outside, he rings the bell aggressively and complains why the mother opens the door so late as soon as she opens it. The little boy has not been scolded for being late, but he anticipates punishment. And then aggression is the best defense. Or you can imagine a patient who complains really angrily with her analyst about her perceived secretiveness, you know, which is neutrality. Like you never have an opinion. You don't even tell me where you go on vacation. There's a big outburst. But really, it is the patient who has been keeping secrets and is afraid of being punished by the analyst. This prophylactic aggression, if you will, always correlates with the amount of anxiety and turns the fear to criticism against the person one is afraid will punish oneself. Again, turning passivity into activity.
Identification with the aggressor is a normal defense against dealing with anxietyinducing others. It can also be nor a normal transitional stage in the development of morals in the super ego where we gradually internalize criticism from the outside attributes from our parents or educators taking over their values and full super ego development would mean to turn criticism into selfc criticism which also means dealing with guilt. This mechanism becomes unhelpful if it doesn't allow for the normal development of the super ego. If it leads to intolerance towards others while being a bit too lenient with herself and if it means that any kind of inkling of guilt leads to lashing out against others and more importantly if identification with the aggressor enters loving relationship. For example, if in a relationship a partner is attacking another for presumingly being unfaithful when really there's no basis for it and most likely the partner who is attacking is the one who was unfaithful or is thinking about it themselves.
It is especially important in psychotherapy in the transference to be able to distinguish between what is aggression and what is identification with the aggressor meaning a defense against anxiety. If psychotherapy unears real aggressive impulses, aggression demands expression in acting out and then it helps. But when aggression defends against anxiety, as is the case with identification with the aggressor, acting out aggression does nothing. Instead, it actually intensifies it until the source of anxiety, the fear of guilt or punishment is understood and lessened.
So, if we go back to the study, we need to take a closer look at the setup of the experiment to understand what might be going on here. So, let's take a look. Participants were tested individually, but each was led to believe that he or she would be interacting with another participant of the same sex. They were told that the researchers were studying first impressions. After giving informed consent, each participant wrote a one paragraph essay on abortion, either pro-choice or pro-life, whichever the participant supported. After finishing, the participant's essay was taken away to be shown to the other participant who was in fact non-existent for evaluation. Meanwhile, the participant was permitted to evaluate the partner's essay, which expressed the opposite view on abortion. For example, if the participant's essay was pro-choice, the partner's essay was pro-life. A short time later, the experimental brought the participant's own essay back with comments ostensibly made by the other participant. All participants received bad evaluations consisting of negative ratings on organization, originality, writing style, clarity of expression, persuasiveness of arguments, and overall quality. There was also a handwritten comment stating, "This is one of the worst essays I have read. Previous research has shown that this procedure makes people quite angry."
If you read this, would you say it's fair to say that this procedure makes people angry? If you imagine the participants punching the punching bag, are they really processing their own aggression? I would say no. They were told that the researchers studied first impressions. And then I would imagine that there was also a lot of anxiety around rejection and shame elicited here. And therefore when the participants punched the punching bag, they were identified with the aggressor to lessen their anxiety, which is why acting out in this case did not help. I would think that what would have been helpful would be to understand and explore the underlying anxiety of being rejected, being shamed, which is exactly what Anna Freud and her concept of identification with the aggressor helps us realize.
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