Anger Is an Energy
Josh Cohen, All the Rage: Why Anger Drives the World
Granta, 256pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781783789450
reviewed by Tymek Woodham
The way we experience anger today is no more evident than in the trenches of our hypermediated lives. On a train, a sign placidly informs me that verbally abusing staff members is inappropriate in civil society, and that I can report any transgression to the company using a QR code. On my smartphone, I flick to a news app where a politician is brought to tears by the online harassment they’ve received ‘simply’ for quibbling over potential misapplications of the word ‘genocide’. On an average work day, I spend two hours on social media platforms watching longform video essays on the subject of ‘online drama’. I reflexively try to un-notice the rate at which a death-toll counter ticks up. I resolve, again, to Genius the lyrics to this summer’s Kendrick/Drake beef when I get home.
There’s a texture to this interplay of mediated rage; a certain weirdness that threads its way into the more prosaic tapestry of familial remonstrance and workplace pass-agg. Simply to call it ‘rage’ doesn’t do justice to the actual mix of feelings as they are experienced: a garish welter of agony, bitterness, resignation, rebellion and guilty pleasure. Somewhere in all of this, relations of cause and effect get tangled up. A sense of scale becomes difficult to intuit, and before long one is left only with clenched fists and jaw tension, the tremors of mammalian fight-or-flight responses evolutionarily dumped into an anxious present.
This kind of dumb, raw, totalising anger is both subject and antagonist of Josh Cohen’s new book All the Rage. Anger, or so the author is eager to remind us, has a tendency to blot out all that surrounds it. A revenge fantasy deludes one into thinking that all will be well after a single act of righteous violence, while the bitter tending of wounds by the perennially hard-done-by demands a kind of prolonged narcissism that nullifies the conditions for empathetic human connection. The death-drive is implacable, destructive and unidirectional: when you’re in it, you’re in it, and it is unlikely that six free hours of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy will inure you to its relentless, omnipresent pulse. For Cohen, the answer is not to reject anger but to understand it; to harness the psychoanalyst’s ability to peer beyond the symptom and steer their insights away from the couch, in the hope that some sense might be extracted from our collective incandescence.
Happily, Cohen stays away from the hasty pathologisations of today’s therapy-speak. As a practicing psychoanalyst, he is suspicious of medicalising categories, or the way diagnosis can interrupt and foreclose productive introspection. To this end, each chapter focuses on a particular psychoanalytic encounter from the author’s own practice, branching off from the central narrative to explore wider cultural, historical or political manifestations of the theme, but always with a clear sense of where the treatment room ends and the public sphere begins. So while Cohen provides an excellent primer in foundational psychoanalytical concepts (steeped as he is mainly in the theories of British psychoanalyst and paediatrician Donald Winnicott, he is particularly good on the topics of Freudian transference and the former’s notion of ‘object-usability’), these insights rarely attain the status of keys to all mythologies, instead sitting side-by-side with the more literary questings of Elena Ferrante’s narrators, or the caustic political demands of Greta Thunberg.
In fact, Cohen’s expansive essayistic style sometimes abrades the genre of popular nonfiction within which his book is placed. All the Rage has been marketed as a handy guide to four distinct categories of rage — ‘righteous’, ‘failed’, ‘cynical’ and ‘usable’ — but this framework somewhat obscures the book’s narrative thrust. While the first two chapters do identify how it feels to exist in our angry present, the second two are concerned with more thorny questions about how one responds to and interprets these feelings: the rage of another, the rage of a population, one’s own rage as a resource for someone else’s use. What begins with autobiographical sketches from the author’s own childhood ends with searching critiques of right-wing populist politicians, abusive psychiatric practitioners and the difficulties of recognition within postcolonial topographies of racial apartheid. Self-knowledge alone simply isn’t going to cut it; to really understand the way ‘anger drives the world’, one must look beyond the heuristic of the individual and situate one’s rage in a much more conflicting and contradictory world-matrix.
This constant demand for more rigorous introspection also provides one of the book’s more entertaining leitmotifs: Cohen’s relentless sniping at psychological methods inherited from behaviouralism. In this, his work is the latest in a line of popular psychoanalysis texts such as Katherine Angel’s Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (2021) or Adam Phillips’ On Getting Better (2021), which critique the tendency of popular discourse to palliate all tremors of psychological disquiet with a voluntaristic conception of individual agency. Psychoanalysts are particularly well-positioned for this critique: Freud’s core insight was, after all, that the deepest and most essential parts of ourselves are fundamentally antagonistic towards rational, conscious thought. Positive thinking gurus, anger management consultants and cognitive behavioural therapists draw Cohen’s ire because they ignore this most constituent part of human nature. If the solution really was as simple as thinking our way out of negative affects, then why the need for the mountain of new self-help books published year in, year out? The uptick in demand alone seems to disprove the literature’s central promise of a cleansed rational actor, purified from all toxicities.
Still, one wonders whether the psychoanalyst’s couch is a better substitute. There is a sense that the author really is serious about the value of psychoanalysis as a form of political transformation, but the solutions he offers are, in practical terms at least, rather dispiriting. More therapy, of course; more visits to art galleries, more face-to-face time offscreen. . .
Cohen is aware of this dissonance, uncomfortable enough in the genre to know that the snappy, practical tone demanded by current-events nonfiction may falter in the face of intractable problems. His final case study discards the well-worn structure of the preceding three chapters (the narrative resolutions of which centre around how the good psychoanalyst forces a breakthrough with his patient) and dives into a detailed exegesis of Wulf Sach’s 1947 book, Black Anger — a pathfinding study in which the codified relationship between analyst and analysand breaks under the pressures of colonial South Africa’s unequal racial hierarchy. In the book’s meeting between Russian Jewish psychoanalyst and Malinka medicine-man, rage loses its status as an awkward, preferably excisable feeling, and becomes instead a generative motor that can force a transformation in the way subjects relate to each other and the political dimensions of the world around them, transcending deeply entrenched interpretive frameworks on either side.
It’s with the spirit of Black Anger that Cohen’s own sympathies reside. Ultimately, he argues that the only way out of our confused, recriminative and nonsensical present is an imaginative openness towards the rage of the other, and a gentle shedding of the professional skins that presume to give us mastery of our own conflicted selves. It’s a modest victory unlikely to be rewarded by the algorithms, but Cohen’s aversion to emotional snake oil is refreshing. Rage is simply too interesting to be excised from human experience; feeling it deeper, rather than stronger, may be the sanest thing one can do.
There’s a texture to this interplay of mediated rage; a certain weirdness that threads its way into the more prosaic tapestry of familial remonstrance and workplace pass-agg. Simply to call it ‘rage’ doesn’t do justice to the actual mix of feelings as they are experienced: a garish welter of agony, bitterness, resignation, rebellion and guilty pleasure. Somewhere in all of this, relations of cause and effect get tangled up. A sense of scale becomes difficult to intuit, and before long one is left only with clenched fists and jaw tension, the tremors of mammalian fight-or-flight responses evolutionarily dumped into an anxious present.
This kind of dumb, raw, totalising anger is both subject and antagonist of Josh Cohen’s new book All the Rage. Anger, or so the author is eager to remind us, has a tendency to blot out all that surrounds it. A revenge fantasy deludes one into thinking that all will be well after a single act of righteous violence, while the bitter tending of wounds by the perennially hard-done-by demands a kind of prolonged narcissism that nullifies the conditions for empathetic human connection. The death-drive is implacable, destructive and unidirectional: when you’re in it, you’re in it, and it is unlikely that six free hours of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy will inure you to its relentless, omnipresent pulse. For Cohen, the answer is not to reject anger but to understand it; to harness the psychoanalyst’s ability to peer beyond the symptom and steer their insights away from the couch, in the hope that some sense might be extracted from our collective incandescence.
Happily, Cohen stays away from the hasty pathologisations of today’s therapy-speak. As a practicing psychoanalyst, he is suspicious of medicalising categories, or the way diagnosis can interrupt and foreclose productive introspection. To this end, each chapter focuses on a particular psychoanalytic encounter from the author’s own practice, branching off from the central narrative to explore wider cultural, historical or political manifestations of the theme, but always with a clear sense of where the treatment room ends and the public sphere begins. So while Cohen provides an excellent primer in foundational psychoanalytical concepts (steeped as he is mainly in the theories of British psychoanalyst and paediatrician Donald Winnicott, he is particularly good on the topics of Freudian transference and the former’s notion of ‘object-usability’), these insights rarely attain the status of keys to all mythologies, instead sitting side-by-side with the more literary questings of Elena Ferrante’s narrators, or the caustic political demands of Greta Thunberg.
In fact, Cohen’s expansive essayistic style sometimes abrades the genre of popular nonfiction within which his book is placed. All the Rage has been marketed as a handy guide to four distinct categories of rage — ‘righteous’, ‘failed’, ‘cynical’ and ‘usable’ — but this framework somewhat obscures the book’s narrative thrust. While the first two chapters do identify how it feels to exist in our angry present, the second two are concerned with more thorny questions about how one responds to and interprets these feelings: the rage of another, the rage of a population, one’s own rage as a resource for someone else’s use. What begins with autobiographical sketches from the author’s own childhood ends with searching critiques of right-wing populist politicians, abusive psychiatric practitioners and the difficulties of recognition within postcolonial topographies of racial apartheid. Self-knowledge alone simply isn’t going to cut it; to really understand the way ‘anger drives the world’, one must look beyond the heuristic of the individual and situate one’s rage in a much more conflicting and contradictory world-matrix.
This constant demand for more rigorous introspection also provides one of the book’s more entertaining leitmotifs: Cohen’s relentless sniping at psychological methods inherited from behaviouralism. In this, his work is the latest in a line of popular psychoanalysis texts such as Katherine Angel’s Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again (2021) or Adam Phillips’ On Getting Better (2021), which critique the tendency of popular discourse to palliate all tremors of psychological disquiet with a voluntaristic conception of individual agency. Psychoanalysts are particularly well-positioned for this critique: Freud’s core insight was, after all, that the deepest and most essential parts of ourselves are fundamentally antagonistic towards rational, conscious thought. Positive thinking gurus, anger management consultants and cognitive behavioural therapists draw Cohen’s ire because they ignore this most constituent part of human nature. If the solution really was as simple as thinking our way out of negative affects, then why the need for the mountain of new self-help books published year in, year out? The uptick in demand alone seems to disprove the literature’s central promise of a cleansed rational actor, purified from all toxicities.
Still, one wonders whether the psychoanalyst’s couch is a better substitute. There is a sense that the author really is serious about the value of psychoanalysis as a form of political transformation, but the solutions he offers are, in practical terms at least, rather dispiriting. More therapy, of course; more visits to art galleries, more face-to-face time offscreen. . .
Cohen is aware of this dissonance, uncomfortable enough in the genre to know that the snappy, practical tone demanded by current-events nonfiction may falter in the face of intractable problems. His final case study discards the well-worn structure of the preceding three chapters (the narrative resolutions of which centre around how the good psychoanalyst forces a breakthrough with his patient) and dives into a detailed exegesis of Wulf Sach’s 1947 book, Black Anger — a pathfinding study in which the codified relationship between analyst and analysand breaks under the pressures of colonial South Africa’s unequal racial hierarchy. In the book’s meeting between Russian Jewish psychoanalyst and Malinka medicine-man, rage loses its status as an awkward, preferably excisable feeling, and becomes instead a generative motor that can force a transformation in the way subjects relate to each other and the political dimensions of the world around them, transcending deeply entrenched interpretive frameworks on either side.
It’s with the spirit of Black Anger that Cohen’s own sympathies reside. Ultimately, he argues that the only way out of our confused, recriminative and nonsensical present is an imaginative openness towards the rage of the other, and a gentle shedding of the professional skins that presume to give us mastery of our own conflicted selves. It’s a modest victory unlikely to be rewarded by the algorithms, but Cohen’s aversion to emotional snake oil is refreshing. Rage is simply too interesting to be excised from human experience; feeling it deeper, rather than stronger, may be the sanest thing one can do.