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This book is the second in a series from the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. It is a collection of thirteen papers by fifteen authors that represents an attempt to lend further clarity to our definitions and meanings of the so-called “negative” affects. In her introduction, Ethel Person highlights the
phylogenetic and ontogenetic functions aggression serves in the regulation of social interactions as well as in the regulation of selfesteem.
The papers explore hypotheses derived from the clinical situation with adults, child observation, brain sciences, ethology, political science, religion, and gender studies. This is a broad representation of vantage points to speculate on the origins, development, meanings, and manifold expressions of aggression.
Most of the writers take seriously their responsibility to define what they mean when they use terms like aggression, aggressive drive (derivatives), irritation, assertiveness, ambition, anger, rage, hate, hostility, sadomasochism, temper tantrums, and power, for example. And for good reasons. The meanings of most, if not all, of these words are not commonly shared. When it comes to the meanings of rage, one questions if qualifiers such as narcissistic rage and murderous rage are necessary.
The first section of the book studies aggression as observed in the clinical situation. The chapters contain contributions by Roy Schafer, Ethel Person, Helen Meyers, Otto Kernberg, Lucy LaFarge and Paul and Anna Ornstein.
In his paper, “Women in the Maze of Power and Rage,” Schafer makes the important point that it is the responsibility of the author to clearly state his or her positions which shape the phenomena being reported, as well as the meanings and significance attributed to them. In the women he is describing, he brings into focus the interplay between experience and the work of unconscious mental processes. Prior to entering analysis, these women were lost in what he calls a maze of sadomas