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It is the author's thesis that anger, unlike anxiety, is readily transmittable, contagious, and a genuinely epidemiological phenomenon. A ten-year study of twenty-four persons in two families over four generations is reported. It emphasizes the presence of states of chronic anger involving all the individuals concerned in circles of frustration, hostility, and aggression. Because overt hostility, fighting, suspicion, temper tantrums, and taking sides had caused severe deterioration of family relationships, and separation, divorce, institutionalization, or open violence were imminent, many members of the family had to be treated concurrently. Within the families the pattern was started by the domineering, hostile, arbitrary behavior of a powerful and materially successful parental figure in one generation who was violently hated but also needed by both his peers and descendants. Various emotional disorders, including paranoid reactions, somatizations, behavior disturbances of childhood, alcoholism, manic depressive psychosis, and congeries of character disturbances, in the various members of the families, are described as responses to chain reactions of overt anger in manifold expression, occurring in epidemic fashion. It is the author's contention from these data that the contagion of these states of anger is a reflection of the inescapable, alloplastic impact peculiar to the emotion of anger, whereby those who are the targets for the anger tend to reciprocate in kind or pass the anger along to others or back to the source of origin, or suffer emotional breakdown when these modes fail to solve the situation of stress. Thorne emphasizes the great limitations of treating only one subject in a group torn with such hostility, and advocates instead concurrent treatment of the various participants.
The presentation is vivid and stimulating, but the author's preoccupation with but one aspect of a complicated situation gives the impression of a monochrome. One misses