Such tenuous emotions are reported to have far reaching results in mental behavior and personal development. One subject, resentful at an implication against the value of his work, considers that it stimulated him to increased determined action and intensified endeavor for several months in order to show the offender he was wrong. A., resentful of X.’s adverse suggestion, put in three days of severe intellectual labor to prove his point. E. observes that a humiliation and mild resentment was a keen stimulus to his ambition. His ambitious behavior, he considers was accompanied by increased friendliness toward the offender. The question was privately put to a number of persons as to the effects of resentment on some of their ambitions in the past. Every person who was asked, after a careful recall, was able to find one and some times several instances of important results of anger of this kind. Some persons from early childhood have habitually reacted to little resentments to beat the offender in an ambitious way. One person with defective eyes early became sensitive about it. Any implication against his defect was always reacted to, he says, by saying to himself, “I will show you I can do more with poor eyes than you can with good ones, and you will be sorry some day.” M. 28—“Resentful because the parents of a lady to whom I was paying attention did not approve of me, I determined to make so much of myself that they would be sorry. It was one of the main incentives to my entering on a career. With this aim I went to the University; I worked hard with success. Many times during the year I would recall the incident and would resolve again and again to show them some day. For two years this idea was pretty constantly in my mind. In the course of four years I now take keen satisfaction in recalling that I have partly accomplished my purpose.” M. 25.—“Four years ago a friend whom I admire much, told me that I would never make a scientist. I have resented it ever since and have laid plans to show him, which I have partly carried out. Every once in a while I recall his statement in connection with my work. It spurs me on. I imagine myself sending him a copy of my scientific problem on which I am working.” M. 34.—“In my sophomore year in college, I failed to be elected president of our literary society. I became resentful against the one who beat me in the election. This person was ambitious in college contests. I now laid plans to beat him. I went into an oratorical contest first with the sole aim of surpassing him. I did not care about the others. I am certain that I would never have gone into this contest and others if it had not been for a deep set resentment developed against him. I recall yet how in practicing and writing in contests during the two years of my college work my aim principally was to surpass this person. We were good friends all the time.”
Such tenuous resentments which persist for years, it may be, against people with whom one is on friendly terms, and which are accompanied by a rather sudden rise in the curve of personal growth, are evidently an essential part of the anger consciousness. Smaller achievements of individual worth are often reported to be the direct result of a healthy sort of reaction from resentment. It is entirely probable that most persons, especially those of irascible disposition, could point to sudden spurts in their own personal development and achievement, which were motivated by anger which never reached the stage of intense excitability or from the residuum of exciting anger which disappeared unsuccessfully. Freud [(9)] has taken the view that much of biography should be rewritten to include the part that sexual motives, which have been sublimated, play in personal ambitions. Evidently anger cannot be neglected by one who seeks for motives of personal growth whether biographer or educator.
A too soft pedagogy which would heal over too soon the injury to self-feelings, has its disadvantages. Encouragement at times by superficial means may cut off a good healthy angry reaction which may be needed. In fact a little lowered self-feeling with an irascible response is a good thing and it may be a signal for “hands off,” or a little skillful and judicious suggestion. It is frequently observed by the subjects studied that anger at self intensifies a lagging willed action and breaks up interfering habits. A quotation from B. will illustrate. “I turned the anger inward and vituperated against myself for being such a lazy man. The emotion of the moment was relieved and I feel now like getting down to work at the stuff and getting it out of the way.” Some subjects work at their very best when mildly angry. Attention and association processes are intensified to the point that real difficulties disappear. Anger in the exciting stage and at a situation too remote from the problem at hand, interferes with mental work. Bryan and Harter [(3)] in their study of skill in telegraphy, found that the skillful operator may work best when angry, but the inexperienced worker is less efficient. Michael Angelo is said to have worked at his best in a state of irascible temper. The mass of mankind are sluggish and need a hearty resentment as a stimulant. If the circumstances are too soft and easy, the best which is in a man may be dormant; there is no tonic to a strong nature capable of bearing it like anger.
Many a good intellect has lacked the good powers of resentment necessary for the most efficient work. The boy who has not the capacity for anger should be deliberately taught it by some means. Göthe, who was a rather keen observer of human nature, said, “With most of us the requisite intensity of passion is not forth-coming without an element of resentment, and common sense and careful observation will I believe confirm the opinion that few people who amount to anything are without a good capacity for hostile feelings upon which they draw freely when they need it.”
Need of Expression. The second condition for the expression of anger is that in which reaction is an end in itself. It may be said that while on the one hand from a genetic and utilitarian point of view the function of anger is to do work, to aid in behavior, where increased willed action is needed; on the other, the mere expressional side in connection with feeling and impulse assumes an important role in every emotion. In fact with intense and exciting anger, utility may be ignored and actually thwarted, volitional action is exerted contrary to objective needs.
There is much in the expression of anger in both the subjective and objective reaction to the emotion whose impulsive aim is merely to release unpleasant feeling tension, to clear the mental atmosphere, so to speak. A brief resumé of the reactive consciousness to anger will illustrate. First on the feeling side there occurs a mental situation accompanied by a tendency to expression in order to remove or modify the situation. Irritation may be relieved or turned into pleasantness by the reaction. Lowered self-feeling may be restored with extra compensation in pleasurable feelings of victory, if the reaction has been successful. Second, the expression of anger involves restraint, the cruder unsocial tendencies are controlled and others are substituted of a less objectionable and offensive nature. By both objective and subjective reactions, devices of disguise, transfer and modification of the unsocial pugnacious tendencies may allow the restraint to be released and the emotive tendency fully satisfied, in which a feeling of pleasantness follows. Third, the reaction which has been fully satisfactory from the feeling side, is followed by a partial or complete immunity against the recurrence of the anger from the same mental situation, as the successful reaction has removed the mental situation from which the emotion arose.
Anger from the point of view stated above, touches upon the second educational aim. So large a part of the reactive consciousness to anger is motivated to find a successful surrogate for cruder and unsocial tendencies which are objectional, that this side of anger expression is educationally important. It is a desirable personal equipment to have strong potentialities of anger. However there should be a mentality which is versatile and active enough by training and habit to react successfully to the emotion, in the first place to use such reservoirs of energy for work, and second, to react satisfactorily from the feeling-side, where the instinctive tendencies are restrained, and break up morbid and unpleasant mental tension which may be an inference.
A good angry outburst at times may be a good thing, but most frequently some sort of surrogate is more satisfactory. Habits of witticism, refined joking, a little good-natured play and teasing within the limits of propriety serves a worthy end for mental hygiene, and often leaves a basis for good will and a friendship which would otherwise be in danger. The habit of suddenly breaking up an angry tension by a good thrust of wit or joke would be a good one to inculcate with the irascibly inclined. Many persons suffer in feelings and lack of good friendship because they have never learned to be good mental sparrers and to relieve their emotions by socially appropriate reaction rather than by a method of repression which is cheaper at the moment but more expensive in the end. Their anger is too absorbing and serious. It lacks the necessary flexibility, their emotions are too near the instinctive level and when the instinctive tendencies are restrained they lack mental habits of purging their feelings in a satisfactory way, consequently suppression is resorted to as a self-defense.