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Modern psychoanalytic thought has emphasized the importance of anger, hate and aggression, and defenses against them, in the dynamics of various pathological conditions. Most writers explain the necessity of defense against angry impulses in terms of the anticipated dangerous consequences of their expression, such as the threat of loss of the object's love or nurture, the threat of destroying the object, the threat of retaliatory destruction of the self by the object, or the threat of condemnation by the superego. The quantity or intensity of the aggressive impulse has also been stressed as a factor contributing to the necessity of defense: the stronger the impulse, the greater the threat of loss of control, and hence the greater the necessity for defense.
I would like to contribute a small addendum to the above theoretical considerations, an addendum which attempts to approach the issue on a phenomenological level. For it seems that the immediate experience of anger or hate, in and of itself, may be of a certain quality that adds to the necessity of its repression, and that individuals differ in the degree to which this holds true. In other words, from a phenomenological point of view, there are qualitative differences in the experience of anger or hate per se, which contribute to the degree to which its repression is felt by the ego to be necessary.
Phenomenologically, the immediate experience of anger or hate is felt as an