Outrageousness, Compliance and Authenticity

Probably every psycho-analyst would agree with the general statement that affects have a peculiarly intimate relation with instincts but that they are essentially ego-experiences. As Freud (1915) said years ago: "It is surely of the essence of an emotion that we should feel it, i.e., that it should enter consciousness". Further, we should probably agree that affects constitute a specific kind, or mode, of ego-experience; that they vary both in quality and quantity, and that individuals differ markedly both in the range and in the intensity of their affectivity. It is when we try to make these general statements more precise that we encounter difficulties. … We must have logical theory, but we do not work with theory, we work with living impulses and feelings. Hence, we should do well to check our theory by constant reference to our working experience of affects.— Marjorie Brierley

IN THE FORTY-NINE YEARS AND MORE since Marjorie Brierley wrote her pace-marker article, a great deal has been written about affects of various sorts. Green (1973) discusses this literature exhaustively and critically in his book: Le Discours Vivant. Yet, to my knowledge the affective ego states of outrage and outrageousness have never been discussed, despite the fact that as early as 1920 Freud himself singled out "the outrageous" as one of the precipitating causes of war neurosis:

We (the psycho-analytic school of psychiatry) had further asserted that neurotic patients suffered from mental conflicts and that the wishes and inclinations which were expressed in the symptoms were unknown to the patients themselves—were, that is to say, unconscious. It was therefore easy to infer that the immediate cause of all war neuroses was an unconscious inclination in the soldier to withdraw from the demands, dangerous or outrageous to his feelings, made upon him by active service.

I am proposing that the affective ego state of outrage and/or outrageousness should be clinically considered as a di