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This is the second volume in the series on “The Role of Affect in Motivation, Development and Adaptation,” edited by Ethel Spector Person, M.D. It is well recognized that an understanding of normal and abnormal psychological development cannot be achieved without an understanding of aggression. Anna Freud (1972), commenting on the status of our theory of aggression, noted that there has been a general failure to explain the role of aggression in infantile
development, in the various functions of the psychic structure, in character formation and in the pathogenesis of different types of psychopathology. This monograph is a further effort, and I think a successful one, to enhance our understanding of human aggression.
Ethel Person, as the Series Editor, has written an introduction that is succinct and thoughtful and that reveals the intellectual impetus of the volume. She rightfully notes that our understanding of aggression has to move beyond a concern with instinct and drives to an interest in the centrality of the affects associated with aggression, that is, the “darker passions” of anger, rage, and hostility. She notes that hostility and aggression imply destructive behavior toward another, while anger is an alerting affect and a “necessary regulator” that provides a signal for organization and direction. Anger, she states, is “about changing an interaction with an object,” while aggression is “about the destruction of the object” and “power is about the structuring of an ongoing relationship with the object” (p. 7). Rage is referred to as an affect that may or may not mobilize destructive behavior (p. 2).
It is clear that the book is organized around the concept of affect as a complex phenomenon associated not only with an emotional/ feeling state, but also with cognitive components and object relational dynamics. Most importantly, the affects are conceptualized as having an organizing influence that affects adaptation, development, and character structure. The c