Internal Prohibitions against Female Anger

Difficulty in the management of anger and aggression is not exclusively a “woman's problem.” In clinical work, we see individuals of both sexes who are inhibited in the direct expression of realistic anger and protest or are prone to impulsive, poorly modulated aggressive outbursts. Indeed, the management of anger and aggression presents intrapsychic difficulties for all of us, interfering in varying degrees with our capacity to work and to love.

However, there are also conspicuous sex differences, as well as similarities. Put simply, women tend to be overly inhibited, and men not inhibited enough, in the direct expression of anger and aggression. Although there are many exceptions to the rule, the greater aggressivity of the male sex is an observable fact of life, documented by clinical and experimental research.1 That men wage war, and women do not, is noted by Helen Block Lewis1 to be the clearest and most indisputable difference between the sexes, apart from the biological reality that only women give birth and nurse babies.

It is, perhaps, surprising that mental health professionals have failed to examine the vicissitudes of anger and aggression for each sex separately. The recent work of Teresa Bernardez-Bonesatti2 is the first serious attempt to carefully elucidate the intrapsychic and cultural factors that are specific to women's difficulties with anger and aggression. Clearly, women's problems in this area merit special study, for men and women have different anatomical structures to come to terms with, different developmental tasks to master, and different socialization inputs from parents and the culture at large throughout a lifetime.

Differences in socialization inputs for each sex are dramatic in regard to anger and aggression. From birth, the parent's awareness of the child's sex (“My baby is a girl!”) organizes and directs that parent's response to the child's expression of anger, rebelliousness, and protest. Despite changes