Anger Scripts

• Here's Wishing I Can Proffer A Sympathetic Bit by Jim Duffy, 4/30/97
  
  

Jim Duffy's latest missive is such a rich post with so many wise observations that it deserves to be the beginning of a thread rather than a continuation of the previous messages. If it attracts as many replies as it deserves, and if those replies get buried in the depths of BOL I'll ask Gil Levin to move the group of posts to allow more responses. Let's start with Jim's accurate comments about Chauncey's style of operation, and then deal with Jim's comments about anger.

Part I: Styles of disputation

When Silvan Tomkins was dying of lymphoma in 1991 I discussed with him the idea of an institute bearing his name and honoring his work. He grunted assent, but despaired at the difficulties we would encounter getting the field of academic psychology to study and accept ideas that required so much study and the willingness to discard homey theories that no longer made sense. My strategy was to avoid the academic psychologists (it is very difficult for them to get a grant to study someone else's ideas) and to concentrate on the huge mass of practicing psychotherapists who are much more interested in what works to help their patients than in the theory from which it has been carved. Despite that I have published so much in the past 15 years and worked so hard to develop theories that fit consensual reality, I have never been invited to ISRE (The International Society for Research on Emotion) because I am a physician/therapist rather than an academic. One of Tomkins's closest colleagues even said to my face (ear, really; it was on the telephone) that I intended to "steal" his theory and take credit for it myself; she actually stood up and walked out of the auditorium during my presentation at the September 1991 memorial for Tomkins we held in Philadelphia! As is known to any of you who have attended our annual colloquia in Philadelphia, I describe myself as the Senior Student of affect theory rather than any sort of expert.

One more piece of the puzzle: Not only did the group surrounding Tomkins bristle at the idea that a clinician (and a [dissmelled] physician at that!) indended to broadcast and teach his ideas (even now only a tiny fraction of them will have anything to do with the SSTI) but it turns out that a significant number of scientists had been pirating pieces of Tomkins's theories and crediting the work to themselves knowing that few if any would take the trouble to slog through Tomkins to prove larceny. If my goal was to establish these ideas within the community of thinkers, and to establish the core of them as arising from the mind of Silvan S. Tomkins, I was far safer building a groundswell of colleagues within the world of psychotherapy. For all those who had no interest in learning new material there was an even larger horde of highly intelligent men and women who were both hungry for new ideas and who rankled at the idea that simply because they were clinicians they were declared unfit for serious thought. Clinicians teach patients, many of whom might influence others who might later do research . . .

Just as Jim loves sayings that express much in few words, my personal signature line is "Most theories work not because of the data they explain but because of what they ignore."

It was one thing to establish an Institute and quite another to get it moving; not until I convinced Vick Kelly to join me in this effort did it have a ghost of a chance to be more than a concept. It is as a result of Vick's work that the American Council on Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) suggested we make the Internet a significant part of our program of teaching. When Gil Levin asked me to join BOL, everything began to fall into place.

The forum on which we are now conversing is a microcosm of our profession. The idological scripts of those who post here run the gamut from pure humanist to pure normative, with most of us somewhere in the middle. If you look carefully at the responses Vick and I provide from time to time, you will see that our approach is fairly consistent: Any issue can be examined better when we look at the affects involved and try to figure out the stimulus-affect-response sequences that masquerade as positions.

Chauncey is a perfect example of this process. At all times he asks people to look at people in order to see what made them do what they did. He refuses to take the traditional position that "Bad people do bad things," or that "These people do bad things because of terrible social forces," or that "It doesn't matter what you do because bad people will always do bad things unless they are restrained by powerful forces arrayed on the side of the good." Chauncey says that the workplace is full of people who handle their own shame conflicts by shaming others, and that if we look at shaming interaction we can do a lot to make the world of work less toxic for everybody. Chauncey says that it doesn't do any harm to ask questions and that if we don't ask such questions nothing will ever change. Even though he wandered into our forum with no expectations, he is the type-specific example of a Tomkins Institute member (he joined recently, by the way) who is more interested in sober thought and reasonable discussion than in the defense of any position.

Where he and I disagree is in how to approach people who are more interested in destructive conflict than study and learning. We've set up this forum as a cyberspace locus for the latter and simply don't have the time or energy to deal with dishonest colleagues who use the freedom of access inherent in an open Internet system in order to insult or shift focus to their own issues. You may have noticed that when one of these (otherwise intelligent and perceptive) colleagues asked for a response in a language other than the one on which this forum is based (because he had no interest in and did not like our approach), no one answered. Hecklers are welcome only if they study before they throw nettles. I'm old enough to remember the 60s line "What if they gave a war and no one came?", and I try to instrument it by ignoring those who, after a few polite attempts to see if they are here to learn or to attack, continue to use dissmell and disgust as their tools. I suspect that the forum loses little if we pay less attention to those whose style is meant more to provoke fights rather than to share ideas.

Part II: Jim's comments about anger

Yup, you've got the idea, Jim. Distress-Anguish and Anger-Rage are two related but different ranges of response to constant density stimulation; it is normal to sob when angry simply because even though anger-rage has been triggered, with its roar and reddened face, the constant density stimulus is still capable of setting off the crying response.

Straws break the backs of camels when the combined weight of the tiny, lightweight straws form enough mass to be ponderous. That's the basis of democracy, isn't it? But isn't democracy supposed to be inherently good, broken-down camels intrinsically sad, and negative affect inherently bad? Not if you play within the rules of affect theory. Densities, gradients, mass action---all these are ways of looking at process that ignore the content of the stimulus.

The attack other pole of the compass of shame is (as Mel Hill said so well the other day) a decontamination script through which we substitute an action in which we feel competent (although less democratic) for a feeling state in which we had felt incompetent. Had I understood script theory better in 1991 when I completed the manuscript of Shame and Pride, I would have written differently the chapter on Overload in which I suggested that people who are unable to handle high density affect of any sort often resort to an explosion of anger to "clear the air." There are lots of reasons one may use anger within a script, but the reason I included this group of scripts under the compass of shame is that I wanted to demonstrate that shame is not "withdrawal" but a cluster of responses only a few of which had previously been understood as connected. The affect anger-rage can become a tool for the resolution of the painful shame-related ideoaffective complexes stored in any individual. As I have pointed out again and again, in the past 40 years there has been a shift from the social requirement that shame be experienced at the withdrawal and attack self poles to a general rule that shame be expressed at the avoidance and attack other poles of the compass. Any affect can be brought to bear within an script for the management of any other affect simply by recalling or visualizing the innate triggers for the new affect.

You may notice that I always avoid the use of the term "defense" in my explanation of such scripts. Remember that Freud introduced this language when he believed that the organism wanted to remain at rest and free of stimulus, and that everything we do is a defense against the effect of that stimulus. It was as a ludicrous extension of this theory that Selye introduced his post-WWII idea that any stimulus is a "stressor" and that even love is stress. Within affect and script theory there is no language of defense but only the interplay of affects, the ideas with which they have become involved or connected, and the techniques through which all affect is modulated and managed. When we are stimulated, or when an affect is triggered, nothing and no one is being attacked, and there is no need to use the language of defense. This ain't no war, baby. You don't even got to use the language of war to explain war any more.

• Don, Lots to Think About--Thank You by Jim Duffy, 4/30/97