Articles
Malignant Self Love -
Narcissism Revisited
The Iron Mask
The Common Sources of Personality Disorders
page 3
Anger is a primitive, limbic emotion. Its excitatory components and patterns
are shared with sexual excitation and with fear. It is cognition that guides our
behaviour, aimed at avoiding harm and aversion or at minimising them. Our
cognition is in charge of attaining certain kinds of mental gratification. An
analysis of future values of the relief-gratification versus repercussions
(reward to risk) ratio – can be obtained only through cognitive tools. Anger is
provoked by aversive treatment, deliberately or unintentionally inflicted. Such
treatment must violate either prevailing conventions regarding social
interactions or some otherwise deeply ingrained sense of what is fair and what
is just. The judgement of fairness or justice (namely, the appraisal of the
extent of compliance with conventions of social exchange) – is also cognitive.
The angry person and the personality disordered both suffer from a cognitive
deficit. They are unable to conceptualise, to design effective strategies and to
execute them. They dedicate all their attention to the immediate and ignore the
future consequences of their actions. In other words, their attention and
information processing faculties are distorted, skewed in favour of the here and
now, biased on both the intake and the output. Time is "relativistically
dilated" – the present feels more protracted, "longer" than any future.
Immediate facts and actions are judged more relevant and weighted more heavily
than any remote aversive conditions. Anger impairs cognition.
The angry person is a worried person. The personality disordered is also
excessively preoccupied with himself. Worry and anger are the cornerstones of
the edifice of anxiety. This is where it all converges: people become angry
because they are excessively concerned with bad things which might happen to
them. Anger is a result of anxiety (or, when the anger is not acute, of fear).
The striking similarity between anger and personality disorders is the
deterioration of the faculty of empathy. Angry people cannot empathise.
Actually, "counter-empathy" develops in a state of acute anger. All mitigating
circumstances related to the source of the anger – are taken as meaning to
devalue and belittle the suffering of the angry person. His anger thus increases
the more mitigating circumstances are brought to his attention. Judgement is
altered by anger. Later provocative acts are judged to be more serious – just by
"virtue" of their chronological position. All this is very typical of the
personality disordered. An impairment of the empathic sensitivities is a prime
symptom in many of them (in the Narcissistic, Antisocial, Schizoid and
Schizotypal Personality Disordered, to mention but four).
Moreover, the aforementioned impairment of judgement (=impairment of the
proper functioning of the mechanism of risk assessment) appears in both acute
anger and in many personality disorders. The illusion of omnipotence (power) and
invulnerability, the partiality of judgement – are typical of both states. Acute
anger (rage attacks in personality disorders) is always incommensurate with the
magnitude of the source of the emotion and is fuelled by extraneous experiences.
An acutely angry person usually reacts to an ACCUMULATION, an amalgamation of
aversive experiences, all enhancing each other in vicious feedback loops, many
of them not directly related to the cause of the specific anger episode. The
angry person may be reacting to stress, agitation, disturbance, drugs, violence
or aggression witnessed by him, to social or to national conflict, to elation
and even to sexual excitation. The same is true of the personality disordered.
His inner world is fraught with unpleasant, ego-dystonic, discomfiting,
unsettling, worrisome experiences. His external environment – influenced and
moulded by his distorted personality – is also transformed into a source of
aversive, repulsive, or plainly unpleasant experiences. The personality
disordered explodes in rage – because he implodes AND reacts to outside stimuli,
simultaneously. Because he is a slave to magical thinking and, therefore,
regards himself as omnipotent, omniscient and protected from the consequences of
his own acts (immune) – the personality disordered often acts in a
self-destructive and self-defeating manner. The similarities are so numerous and
so striking that it seems safe to say that the personality disordered is in a
constant state of acute anger.
Finally, acutely angry people perceive anger to have been the result of
intentional (or circumstantial) provocation with a hostile purpose (by the
target of their anger). Their targets, on the other hand, invariably regard them
as incoherent people, acting arbitrarily, in an unjustified manner.
Replace the words "acutely angry" with the words "personality
disordered" and the sentence would still remain largely valid.
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