A young male patient was referred to me because he was failing in college. He was terribly frustrated and angry. In fact, his primary affective state was anger which he tried to deal with by drinking too much and smoking marijuana. When he drank, he became disinhibited, as people tend to do when suffused with ethanol, and his anger would lead him to find provocations and irritations everywhere around him. Typically, the greatest irritation would be found emanating form the largest male at the bar. Often fighting ensued. Unfortunately for this unhappy young man, he was deficient in physical stature and strength and consistently emerged from the bar at a high rate of speed, liberally spouting blood from his many and varied lacerations.
More unfortunately, this young man not only did not see his anger as a problem but he also did not connect his drinking and smoking to his travails in school. He had only come in for an evaluation because his parents had forced him and announced that since he had nothing wrong with him, he had no real need of my services. I told him I didn't know enough about him to speculate on the source of his anger but did think it odd that he was untroubled by the fact that his anger so consistently boomeranged. While he directed his anger at the world, and it always felt justified, in the end his anger always seemed to end up hurting him more than the person he was ostensibly angry at. It was a puzzle to me and I wondered if he was puzzled by such a seeming contradiction as well. He paused and mused that he had never thought about it before but it certainly seemed that I was correct. At that point, I had a patient.
My patient was enraged with the unfairness of his life and could not contain his anger. As a result he was also quite self-destructive (both because the anger was projected and re-introjected and because of deeply ambivalent feelings toward his self- and internal-objects.) As a result, his anger injured him much more than it injured those he felt had hurt him. He scared friends and potential friends away, could never keep a girlfriend for very long, and as noted, tended to get himself beaten up when disinhibited. This young man was perfectly capable of destroying himself because he could not let go of his anger.
I often think of this young man when considering the behavior of the easily offended and chronically enraged, especially our Arab and Muslim enemies. For example, we have already seen that al Qaeda in Iraq has long since run out the patience of the Iraqis who should have been their allies but whom they have thoroughly alienated. Two new items suggest that angry boomerangs may be the weapons of choice in two other areas of interest. The first item is from Israel and offers an interesting suggestion:
Recent Comments