― Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory of relativity, but he also made important contributions to the development of the theory of quantum mechanics. Wikipedia
Frederic William Henry Myers (1843-1901) was a classical scholar who in mid-career turned to the investigation of psychic phenomena. After studying, and later teaching, Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge he resigned his lectureship in 1869, became an inspector of schools, and campaigned for women’s higher education. With the encouragement of former colleagues he began a scientific investigation of spiritualism and related phenomena, and in 1882 he helped to found the Society for Psychical Research. This volume, first published in 1893, is a collection of essays that Myers had previously published in journals. Their topics include Charles Darwin’s religious beliefs, the capacity of contemporary scientific methods to investigate the existence of the soul after death, and an unusual interpretation of Alfred Tennyson’s poetry. These fascinating essays show how Myers engaged with the scientific developments and intellectual currents of his time as he developed his theory of the ‘subliminal self’.
256 pages, Paperback
Published May 19, 2011
(Goodreads.com)
In the oral and written histories of every culture, there are countless records of men and women who have displayed extraordinary physical, mental, and spiritual capacities. In modern times, those records have been supplemented by scientific studies of exceptional functioning.
Are the limits of human growth fixed?
Are extraordinary abilities latent within everyone?
Is there evidence that humanity has unrealized capacities for self-transcendence?
Are there specific practices through which ordinary people can develop these abilities?
Michael Murphy has studied these questions for over thirty years.
In The Future of the Body, he presents evidence for metanormal perception, cognition, movement, vitality, and spiritual development from more than 3,000 sources. Surveying ancient and modern records in medical science, sports, anthropology, the arts, psychical research, comparative religious studies, and dozens of other disciplines, Murphy has created an encyclopedia of exceptional functioning of body, mind, and spirit. He paints a broad and convincing picture of the possibilities of further evolutionary development of human attributes.
By studying metanormal abilities under a wide range of conditions, Murphy suggests that we can identify those activities that typically evoke these capacities and assemble them into a coherent program of transformative practice.
A few of Murphy’s central observations and proposal include:
The observation that cultural conditioning powerfully shapes (or extinguishes) metanormal capacities.
The proposition that we cannot comprehend our potentials for extraordinary life without an empirical approach that involves many fields of inquiry and different kinds of knowing.
The notion that a widespread realization of extraordinary capacities would constitute an evolutionary transcendence analogous to the rise of humankind from its primal ancestry.
The proposal that all or most instances of significant human development are produced by a limited number of identifiable activities such as disciplined self-observation, visualization of desired capacities, and caring for others.
The idea that a balanced development of our various capacities is possible through integrated practices.
In The Future Of The Body, Murphy states that such practices can carry forward Earth’s evolutionary adventure and lead humanity to the next step in its development.
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Lesson 169 By grace I live. By grace I am released.
Grace is an aspect of the Love of God which is most like the state prevailing in the unity of truth. It is the world’s most lofty aspiration, for it leads beyond the world entirely. It is past learning, yet the goal of learning, for grace cannot come until the mind prepares itself for true acceptance. Grace becomes inevitable instantly in those who have prepared a table where it can be gently laid and willingly received; an altar clean and holy for the gift.
Grace is acceptance of the Love of God within a world of seeming hate and fear. By grace alone the hate and fear are gone, for grace presents a state so opposite to everything the world contains, that those whose minds are lighted by the gift of grace can not believe the world of fear is real.
Grace is not learned. The final step must go beyond all learning. Grace is not the goal this course aspires to attain. Yet we prepare for grace in that an open mind can hear the Call to waken. It is not shut tight against God’s Voice. It has become aware that there are things it does not know, and thus is ready to accept a state completely different from experience with which it is familiarly at home.
We have perhaps appeared to contradict our statement that the revelation of the Father and the Son as One has been already set. But we have also said the mind determines when that time will be, and has determined it. And yet we urge you to bear witness to the Word of God to hasten the experience of truth, and speed its advent into every mind that recognizes truth’s effects on you.
Oneness is simply the idea God is. And in His Being, He encompasses all things. No mind holds anything but Him. We say “God is,” and then we cease to speak, for in that knowledge words are meaningless. There are no lips to speak them, and no part of mind sufficiently distinct to feel that it is now aware of something not itself. It has united with its Source. And like its Source Itself, it merely is.
We cannot speak nor write nor even think of this at all. It comes to every mind when total recognition that its will is God’s has been completely given and received completely. It returns the mind into the endless present, where the past and future cannot be conceived. It lies beyond salvation; past all thought of time, forgiveness and the holy face of Christ. The Son of God has merely disappeared into his Father, as his Father has in him. The world has never been at all. Eternity remains a constant state.
This is beyond experience we try to hasten. Yet forgiveness, taught and learned, brings with it the experiences which bear witness that the time the mind itself determined to abandon all but this is now at hand. We do not hasten it, in that what you will offer was concealed from Him Who teaches what forgiveness means.
All learning was already in His Mind, accomplished and complete. He recognized all that time holds, and gave it to all minds that each one might determine, from a point where time was ended, when it is released to revelation and eternity. We have repeated several times before that you but make a journey that is done.
For oneness must be here. Whatever time the mind has set for revelation is entirely irrelevant to what must be a constant state, forever as it always was; forever to remain as it is now. We merely take the part assigned long since, and fully recognized as perfectly fulfilled by Him Who wrote salvation’s script in His Creator’s Name, and in the Name of His Creator’s Son.
There is no need to further clarify what no one in the world can understand. When revelation of your oneness comes, it will be known and fully understood. Now we have work to do, for those in time can speak of things beyond, and listen to words which explain what is to come is past already. Yet what meaning can the words convey to those who count the hours still, and rise and work and go to sleep by them?
Suffice it, then, that you have work to do to play your part. The ending must remain obscure to you until your part is done. It does not matter. For your part is still what all the rest depends on. As you take the role assigned to you, salvation comes a little nearer each uncertain heart that does not beat as yet in tune with God.
Forgiveness is the central theme that runs throughout salvation, holding all its parts in meaningful relationships, the course it runs directed and its outcome sure. And now we ask for grace, the final gift salvation can bestow. Experience that grace provides will end in time, for grace foreshadows Heaven, yet does not replace the thought of time but for a little while.
The interval suffices. It is here that miracles are laid; to be returned by you from holy instants you receive, through grace in your experience, to all who see the light that lingers in your face. What is the face of Christ but his who went a moment into timelessness, and brought a clear reflection of the unity he felt an instant back to bless the world? How could you finally attain to it forever, while a part of you remains outside, unknowing, unawakened, and in need of you as witness to the truth?
Be grateful to return, as you were glad to go an instant, and accept the gifts that grace provided you. You carry them back to yourself. And revelation stands not far behind. Its coming is ensured. We ask for grace, and for experience that comes from grace. We welcome the release it offers everyone. We do not ask for the unaskable. We do not look beyond what grace can give. For this we can give in the grace that has been given us.
Our learning goal today does not exceed this prayer. Yet in the world, what could be more than what we ask this day of Him Who gives the grace we ask, as it was given Him?
By grace I live. By grace I am released.
By grace I give. By grace I will release.
Is anger like energy, forever changing form but never dissipating, or part of our repertoire of desires, the cry of a need unmet?Photo by Espen Rasmussen/VG/Panos Pictures
Josh Cohen is a psychoanalyst in private practice and professor of modern literary theory at Goldsmiths University of London. His books include How to Read Freud (2005), Not Working (2019) and How to Live. What To Do. (2021).
Edited by Marina Benjamin
6 January 2022 (aeon.co)
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Apsychoanalytic consulting room is a crucible for a rich array of emotions. But perhaps none appears more insistently as anger, nor in so many guises. For example, a woman finds her apparently inexplicable rage against her partner manifesting in asthmatic attacks so severe she becomes fearful of being in the same room with him. In the first weeks of psychotherapy, a man expresses his fury over a professional betrayal by withholding from me almost all relevant information about himself. Again, a man with a respiratory illness is so angry at the doctors policing his behaviours – and at my imagined finger-wagging complicity – that he smokes heavily in supposed retaliation. The morning after Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States, a woman begins to cry furiously as soon as she sits down. When I wonder aloud if this revives memories of her own bullying, bigoted father, she shouts that she is crying about one thing and one thing only and doesn’t want to hear my boring shrink bullshit.
A psychoanalytic consulting room proves an apt place to observe an essential paradox about anger. As almost anyone can confirm, manifest anger is by its nature felt and received with an intense immediacy, bringing to life the bodily and emotional resonances of the word ‘feelings’. And yet it is also peculiarly slippery, liable to hide and dissemble, to disguise itself in myriad other ways – in reticence, nervousness, politeness or over-friendliness. If anger isn’t making itself felt openly and immediately, it is lurking somewhere in the vicinity, hiding itself under cover of some other, less conspicuous emotional state, biding its time and waiting to spring.
In clinical discussions with my colleagues, anger never fails to come up. Often it imposes itself by sheer force; patients complain, criticise and curse their intimates, their colleagues, the guy on the bus, bad pop songs, overpriced grocery shops, sometimes explicitly and almost always implicitly inserting the analyst himself into their row of targets. At other times, anger insinuates itself more surreptitiously, perhaps without the conscious awareness of the patient, who may protest (angrily) to the suggestion that this is how he’s feeling. Anger is everywhere and nowhere in clinical work, overwhelmingly present and ominously absent. But its prominence in collegial discussion has never been matched by conceptual interest. We tend to think of anger as a piece of content, one emotional state among others.
So why then, sitting in the consulting room, not to mention reading and watching the news, is it hard to avoid the sense that anger is more than a colour on the emotional spectrum? Why does it seem to manifest as a force that moves the world, directing the unpredictable flows of private and public life?
In Sigmund Freud’s case histories, theoretical papers and cultural commentaries alike, anger appears as one of the great motive forces of the self and the world. The Oedipus complex, for example, cornerstone of his theory of psychic development, is premised on the formative power of murderous rage. Although Freud nowhere offers a discrete and integral conceptual treatment of anger, he hints at the structural place of anger in psychic life, notably within a very brief clinical vignette from a founding text of psychoanalysis, the ‘Preliminary Communication’ (1893), written with his older colleague, the general physician Josef Breuer, which outlined the pair’s therapeutic innovations in the treatment of hysteria.
A man consults a young physician at his newly established practice for the treatment of nervous disorders. He has been suffering from spontaneous hysterical attacks, during which he falls into frenzies of wordless rage. Under hypnosis, he reveals that he’s been ‘living through the scene in which his employer had abused him in the street and hit him with a stick’. Returning a few days later, the patient tells of a second attack, which hypnosis reveals as a staging of the event that had triggered his illness: ‘the scene in the law-court when he failed to obtain satisfaction for his maltreatment’. Freud and Breuer tell us almost nothing about the man. He might be a factory worker or a waiter, but I always imagine him in the mould of an emerging stock type: the pinched, anxious clerk, soon to be immortalised in Franz Kafka’s Josef K or E M Forster’s Leonard Bast, men whose apologetic facade conceals a quietly roiling anger and resentment.
Such iconic fictional figures fit the classic neurasthenic profile that Freud was beginning to treat and write about. A phenomenon of the rapidly urbanising, industrialising society of the late 19th century, neurasthenia was the consequence of a sudden and excessive load of sensory and emotional stimulus bearing down on mind and body, inducing symptoms of irritability, fatigue and depression as well as headaches and spikes in blood pressure. The employee’s silent pantomimic fury suggests a nervous system traumatised and overwhelmed, unable to bear the burden of humiliation induced by the public beating and the subsequent public repudiation of his legal case for compensation.
The baby’s scream announces a gap between a need and its satisfaction
Freud’s clinical interest in the nervous afflictions of the moment was accompanied by more fundamental enquiries into psychic life, equally relevant to the case of the beaten employee. In an unpublished text of 1895, known as the Project for a Scientific Psychology, Freud speculates on the baby’s earliest experience of satisfaction, describing a being beset by excess internal tension brought about by hunger or some other vital need. Unable to provide this for herself, the baby cries, communicating her distress and so drawing the attention of her caregiver. The full circuit of tension, external intervention and relief constitutes ‘an experience of satisfaction’. The efficacy of the baby’s hungry scream leads Freud to the startling inference that ‘the initial helplessness of human beings is the primal source of all moral motives.’ Morality, that is, begins in the distress of the creature who calls on her carers to provide satisfactions she cannot supply for herself. For as long as they fail to do so, she screams her angry proto-moral protest.
The hypnosis of the beaten employee had revealed a similarly helpless scream, this time unvoiced, when he ‘failed to obtain satisfaction for his maltreatment’. The verbal echo is more than coincidence. The humiliating incapacity to gain satisfaction puts the employee in contact with his original infantile helplessness. His reaction, like the baby’s, is a wordless scream of rage, now driven into the silence of unconscious memory.
Hysteria, neurasthenia, infantile need: underlying these very different psychic phenomena is the same experience of helplessness. The baby’s scream announces a gap between a need and its satisfaction, which becomes harder to bear the longer it is sustained. Ordinarily, our physical and emotional development distances us from this state of helplessness; as we grow in mental and bodily autonomy, we are able increasingly to help ourselves, to seek and find the food or love we crave. But as the employee’s case reminds us, an experience of traumatic shock or humiliation can revive in us the desperate vulnerability of the infant. And as my psychoanalytic practice reminds me each day, even much more ordinary experiences – real or perceived insults, slights, rejections, disappointments, frustrations – can bring us into contact with this primary layer of helplessness. More often than not, we manage these feelings of helplessness by means of that state of agitated enervation we call anger.
As soon as we’re born, we are consigned into the care of adults on whom we depend for our survival and our physical, cognitive and emotional growth, and who thereby inevitably draw onto themselves our fluctuating and intermingled love and hatred. From a psychoanalytic perspective, anger cannot be disentangled from these earliest affective experiences.
These experiences bring us up against one of the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, namely the drive. But what is a drive? Freud’s most complete statement on the subject can be found in his paper ‘Drives and Their Vicissitudes’ (1915). His first point is that the drive is a source of stimulus from within the organism, rather than outside it. The difference is crucial in that the impact of an external stimulus – say, a bright light or loud noise – is always temporary. The stimulus exerted by a drive, on the other hand, is ‘always a constant one’. And, because it issues from within, there is no escaping it.
We are forever subject to this internal force of the drive. The impulses to love what satisfies us and to hate what frustrates us are always exerting themselves, sometimes pressing closer to the surface of consciousness, sometimes bubbling away unnoticed. Since the organism can never eliminate the stimuli that issue from the drives, its primary task, one that places a considerable and perpetual burden on the nervous system, is to master them.
For Lacan, anger is the consequence of a failure of a desire to be realised in reality
One of Freud’s most enigmatic claims about the drive, and the source of much commentary and disputation, is that it lies ‘on the frontier between the mental and the somatic’. It is the psychical representative of a bodily stimulus – what an itch might look like if it were a mental rather than dermal entity. Freud ascribes four components to the drive: pressure, the quantity of force a drive exerts in asserting its demand on us; aim, which Freud identifies, in a clear echo of the hungry baby of the Project, as being ‘in every instance satisfaction’; object, the thing required to achieve satisfaction (a breast, a touch, a voice); and source, the somatic location in which the drive originates.
The concepts of aim and object make clear why a drive is distinct from an instinct. An instinct is a piece of programmed biological knowledge that ensures the attainment of vital needs, for example, a bee’s gravitation towards nectar and pollen. Where an instinct is concerned, the path between aim and object is a short, straight line. In a drive, that path is typically more tortuous and uncertain. Its aim is still satisfaction, but just what satisfaction consists in is more ambiguous. This is what the controversial French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan is getting at when he says that ‘the use of the function of the drive has for me no other purpose than to put in question what is meant by satisfaction.’ I may feel hungry, for example, but will a slice or two of dry bread provide the satisfaction I seek? It will answer to my vital need, but not to the sensual desire that calls urgently for a fried egg, butter and Tabasco between the slices.
Nor is this ambiguity a late development in the human being. When the baby cries hungrily, is it merely milk she wants? Or is she seeking the more elusive pleasure that might arise from the smell and feel of her mother’s skin, the flood of warmth that breaks over her lips when the milk flows? The aim and object of a drive, in short, are both subject to infinite variation. Drives, Freud says, can be ‘inhibited or deflected’ in their aim, diverted from the path they started down. Is it a fried egg I want, or smoked salmon, or an obscenely thick smear of peanut butter? Is it her I love, or her, or him, or them?
The relationship between aim and object in the bee is reliably constant. Only one object serves its aim. No bee has ever felt the urge to try ginger ale or vodka today, just for a change. For the human, such changeability defines the drive. In his earlier sustained treatment of the drive, the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud notes that enduring romantic myths – for example, that two people are, as we might put it, ‘made for each other’ – persuade us that the relationship of the sexual drive to the object is ‘more intimate than it in fact is’. In reality, ‘the sexual drive and the sexual object are merely soldered together.’ Drives are fundamentally mobile, subject to fluctuations, displacements, reversals and detours. When they threaten the stability of the organism, they can be inhibited or turned back on us; feeling hate for an object I’m meant to love, for example, may induce such fear and guilt in me that I choose to hate myself instead.
For Lacan, anger is the consequence of a failure of a desire to be realised in reality. Alluding to the French writer Charles Péguy, he remarks: ‘It’s when the little pegs refuse to go into the little holes.’ Drives, in short, destine us to at least some degree of dissatisfaction, soldering our desire to objects we only belatedly realise cannot fulfil it. And the primary language of that dissatisfaction is anger.
Perhaps it is anger’s unpredictability, its unnerving capacity to be ignited by disparate, often fiercely opposing causes, that most disturbs and confuses us (and certainly me) about anger. This confusion often leads thinkers on the subject to seek clarity by separating out preservative (or ‘good’) from destructive (or ‘bad’) forms of anger. We see a move of this kind, for example, in many recent feminist and antiracist writers and activists who celebrate the power of anger to motivate social change and address structural forms of injustice and division.
This idea of anger as an essentially affirmative and life-preserving affect finds some support in the scant psychoanalytic literature on the subject. In a 1949 paper on normal and traumatic experiences of birth, the British paediatrician psychoanalyst Donald W Winnicott suggests that the cry of a baby following a normal birth is a rudimentary form of self-assertion: ‘in the form of the cry anger can be ego-syntonic [that is, supportive of our internal equilibrium] from very early, an expulsive function with clear aim, to live one’s own way and not reactively.’
But when the newborn’s vital needs of warmth, nourishment and love are frustrated by delay or by environmental difficulties, the effect is far more dystonic. When a cry achieves its aim, it helps a baby learn what her anger is for. Whereas if a cry has little or no effect, its purpose gradually becomes less ‘definite’ for the baby, leaving her in a state of despairing uncertainty, with significant consequences for the person she will become: ‘the individual is always left with some confusion about anger and its expression.’ A key implication of Winnicott’s distinction here is that anger promotes growth and helps define selfhood when it attains the satisfaction it demands – that is, when the needs it expresses are fulfilled. But when those needs go unanswered, it has the opposite effect, implanting confusion and despair in the heart of the self.
When a claim for justice is dismissed, anger is liable to take on a life of its own
This latter form of anger puts me in mind of Gordon, a man in his 40s whom I saw in intensive psychoanalysis for six years. Gordon was prone to crippling headaches and extended periods of insomnia that made him feel as though he were coming apart at the seams. These symptoms were always most prevalent at times when a romantic relationship was becoming more serious. The prospect of fulfilling his longing for love and a family was a source of overwhelming panic, which expressed itself in the form of sudden verbal outbursts against his partner for failing to understand what he was going through. Sleeplessness and pain would exacerbate his brittleness and fragility, perpetuating a grim cycle of rage and apology until the relationship collapsed under the strain.
Gordon had been raised from shortly after birth by maternity nurses and nannies who instituted a strict regime of sleep training and timed feeds. At seven, he was sent to boarding school, a further blow to any aspiration, as Winnicott has it, ‘to live one’s own way and not reactively’. Gordon’s initial protests against boarding school were met by his parents with assurances that he would grow to like it – they, after all, had been sent away at his age, and had grown to appreciate the experience. Gordon’s problem with forming lasting relationships was that he could never trust that he would enjoy what Freud calls an ‘experience of satisfaction’, where cries of need are heard and attended to in good time. The more he put himself in the hands of someone else, the more fearful he became of being ignored or abandoned. Because he’d never found words or a receptive listener for his anxieties, they came to be expressed instead in bodily symptoms, the pain from which would eventually find an outlet in uncontrolled rage.
Gordon was aware of being angry, but this anger felt like a possession by some demon over which he had no control; he had no idea what he was angry about at these moments, nor what he wanted. Unheard, unanswered anger is apt to become diffuse and uncontrolled, to become master rather than servant of the person.
Perhaps Gordon’s predicament speaks to the public anger that has made itself so palpable in recent years. The protests of the Movement for Black Lives and MeToo and Extinction Rebellion, and those of the movements for Trump and Brexit, so vastly different in content, have in common the complaint that their cries for recognition and response have for far too long been ignored.
We want to believe that our anger can be clearly directed and localised – that we can, as Judith Butler puts it, ‘craft and cultivate’ it. But as the beaten employee reminds us, when a claim for justice is dismissed, anger is liable to take on a life of its own. We are living in a world of proliferating and often conflicting angry demands for recognition. In terrorism, populist authoritarianism and online hate, we see some of the consequences of their denial.
Insofar as unsatisfied needs and unattended demands are endemic to life, so is anger. This insight, central to Freud and Breuer’s approach in the ‘Preliminary Communication’, is also the basis for their therapeutic remedy, which they call ‘abreaction’, or catharsis. It is a way of cleansing ourselves of the suppressed anger that accretes in us in the course of a life. Certain memories, they suggest, behave like ingested foreign bodies; instead of passing through the mental digestive system, they lodge in us and are preserved intact. Memories torment us with all the force and freshness of the present moment because they ‘correspond to traumas that have not been sufficiently abreacted’.
Under hypnosis, the beaten employee acted out the silent rage he had been forced to suppress, both in the street and in the court. This is the basis of the abreactive technique – as the repressed memory rises to the surface of consciousness, so does ‘its accompanying affect’, enabling the patient to describe the distressing experience and the feelings it aroused as fully as possible. This is the psychotherapy of ‘energetic reaction’, of a release of a quantum of emotion proportionate to the injury suffered. It is a technique whose rationale is implied in such idiomatic phrases as ‘crying oneself out’ or ‘blowing off steam’ [the German is sich austoben, literally ‘to rage oneself out’], as well as in folk anger-management techniques such as pillow bashing. Without such hydraulic release, the distress and anger felt by the victim is only an ongoing burden on the nervous system.
The idea of a treatment directed at unmetabolised pain lodged in the deepest strata of mind and body has since been revived in various therapies, most famously in Arthur Janov’s ‘primal therapy’, popularly known as primal scream therapy, which enjoyed a brief vogue in the early 1970s. After some months of therapy with Janov – an encounter brilliantly imagined in Kevin Barry’s novel Beatlebone (2015) – John Lennon declared: ‘I am myself and I know why.’ Like Freud and Breuer, Janov saw psychic pain as located in suppressed traumas of early childhood. The proposed cure was to discharge the trapped reactive anger in uninhibited and spontaneous screaming and ranting.
The very fact of living together forces on us a renunciation of our erotic and aggressive drives
The theory of abreaction assumes that feelings are stored in finite quantities, such that they can be cried or raged out until they have been fully discharged. But as he developed his thinking and gained clinical experience, Freud came to see his belief in abreaction as a mistake, albeit a productive one. What it misses is the dogged persistence of feelings, their stubborn refusal to disappear on demand. The screams of the baby or the traumatised adult register a state of dissatisfaction, a gap between a need or desire – hunger, love, justice – and its fulfilment. But dissatisfaction is not simply a temporary state awaiting relief through appropriate action; it is an ineliminable condition of human life.
In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud posits that the very fact of living together forces on all of us a renunciation of our erotic and aggressive drives. In order to make room for everyone else, I have to curb my own extravagant appetites for love, power and pleasure. While the theory of abreaction locates our discontent in the external world – the painful experience is a ‘foreign body’, like the employer’s stick, breaching our physical and psychic skin – the appetites Freud describes in Civilization and Its Discontents are felt as insistent internal tensions, permanent itches demanding the relief of a scratch. They issue not from outside but from within, in what he calls the drives. Anger, in other words, is the primary way a drive expresses itself when it is pressing for satisfaction.
‘Rage’, writes the American psychoanalyst Michael Eigen, in a pithy summation of Winnicottian thinking, ‘seems built into an infant’s scream’. In her book The Violence of Interpretation (1975), the French psychoanalyst Piera Aulagnier offers the most sustained and radical elaboration of this link between rage and helplessness. She distinguishes between two basic ways the infantile psyche represents its relation to another being (what psychoanalysis calls an ‘object’), which exist alongside one another. In one, which Aulagnier calls love, the baby unites with its object in perfect unity. In the other, which she calls hate, the baby experiences the object (say, the mother’s nourishing breast) as what it lacks and depends upon for survival. In being brought up against its dependency, the baby’s psyche, writes Aulagnier, is forced into awareness of its own liability to ‘find itself in a state of lack’, in which mind and body are in a state of helpless desire for what they do not have and cannot acquire for themselves.
Take my patient Gordon: his drive to love and be loved propels him towards a partner. But love has laid down certain pathways in his deep memory; it means betrayal, abandonment, disappointment. The conflict between the pressure of the drive and the psyche’s need to contain that pressure becomes unsupportable, as the headaches and sleeplessness attested.
Homer began the Iliad with a celebrated apostrophe to the Muse: ‘Sing, goddess, of the anger of Achilleus, son of Peleus, the accursed anger which brought uncounted anguish on the Achaians …’ The place of such elemental anger in the subsequent course of cultural history can hardly be overstated. Greek, Norse and Hindu mythologies and theogonies abound with avatars of pure rage, echoes of which can be heard in writers and artists down the ages. Anger beyond measure – the annihilating vengeance of Medea and Hecuba, the jealous delirium of Othello, the blind fury of Captain Ahab, the unbound ranting of Ice Cube and Eminem – has exerted a fascination over writers and readers down the centuries.
It seems difficult to encounter these figures today without being reminded of the public anger that seems to define our political present, of the fierce agitations for justice across the world, provoked by the injurious and ongoing histories of racialised and misogynistic violence and discrimination, as well as of environmental despoliation, not to mention the reactive rage of nationalists and racists, of militant men’s rights activists, climate change deniers and COVID-19 conspiracists. Rage of this kind encapsulates the logic of the drive. It seems to emanate from a source deep in the soul, the force or ‘pressure’ it exerts bursting the bounds of any possible container. Such rage aims for satisfaction, yet there seems to be no object that can satisfy it.
The Iliad could be described as a failed quest to bring Achilles’ accursed anger under the rule of reason and proportion. When the warrior Aias reproaches him, during the failed mission to persuade him to join the battle against the Trojans, for the ‘savagery in his breast’ and lack of ‘thought for the love of his companions’, Achilles doesn’t deny the charge: ‘all that you have said seems much after my own feeling’. ‘But,’ he goes on, ‘my heart swells with anger whenever I think of that time, how the son of Atreus treated me with contempt in front of the Argives.’
As Homer and Achilles remind us, it isn’t easy to keep anger on the side of reason and proportion
‘In front of the Argives’: I can’t help feeling that Achilles’ humiliation puts him in the wildly anomalous company of the beaten employee. Achilles is forced to watch tearfully as his concubine Briseïs, a ‘prize’ of war, is taken from him by Agamemnon’s forces, just as the employee must submit to the power and violence of his boss and the word of the court. Both are made to feel helpless before larger powers, and their shame before a crowd of witnesses. Nor can either man command or contain his anger. Achilles acknowledges Aias’ characterisation of his anger as ‘implacable and perverse’, only to imply that this implacability is the very heart of the problem; rage has taken possession of him, to the point that he cannot gainsay it. It isn’t in his gift to forgive or let go the offence against him, even to save his benighted companions from the marauding Trojans.
The failure of Homer’s heroes to contain their emotions is at the heart of Socrates’ argument to banish the poets from the Republic. Singing the anger of Achilles seduces the listener with perverse indulgence in vice and bad character. Poetry ‘fosters and waters’ feelings that corrupt the soul; it ‘sets them up as rulers in us when they ought to be ruled’.
Plato evidently doesn’t wish to abolish anger. The broader meaning of the Greek word thymos that the Homer translator Martin Hammond renders ‘anger’ is spiritedness or passion. In Plato’s Republic, thymos is the intermediate level in his tripartite division of the soul. As the faculty of self-assertion and the desire for recognition, its highest function is to direct anger against our own tendency towards moral laxity and licence. It is, we might say, an ancient version of what psychoanalysis might call an internal parent or superego function. As thymos, anger can be pressed into the service of moral self-discipline, helping to ensure that we remain rulers over, and not ruled by, our feelings. But, as Homer and Achilles remind us, it isn’t easy to keep anger on the side of reason and proportion.
Kept under the rule of reason, anger has its educative uses. But as the historian Barbara Rosenwein has shown in her recent study of the history of anger, other philosophical and religious traditions are rather less sanguine about the prospect of keeping anger under reason’s command. Intuiting anger as inherently excessive, various religious and philosophical traditions, both Eastern and Western, seek nothing less than the banishment of anger from the repertory of psychic states.
The Buddha enjoins us to ‘abandon anger’ as a primary cause of needless suffering. It inflates the ego’s deluded self-importance, tormenting the mind of the angry person as much as it persecutes the objects of his anger. Unsurprisingly, Western iterations of Buddhism have been a major influence on the development of modern anger-management techniques. The same can be said for Stoicism, perhaps the Western philosophical tradition that most closely parallels Buddhism. Seneca’s treatise De Ira, published around 45 CE, portrays anger as a force that deranges the soul, distorting our faculties of right perception and judgment, and propelling us to self-destruction with its untameable momentum. Like the body of a man falling over a cliff, anger’s onrush cannot be checked – ‘its own weight and the downward-tending nature of vices must – must – carry it along and drive it down to the depths.’
The Stoic repudiation of anger has inspired much recent philosophy and psychology, notably the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum doesn’t deny that our world provokes daily and abundant moral outrage, but she insists that this outrage must be fully directed towards practical resolution, while its emotional remainders – the wish to inflict retaliatory suffering on the offender, the persistence of bitterness and rancour – must be eliminated. The cognitive registration of grounds for anger, in other words, should never spill over into actual angry feelings.
These more radical positions on anger – that it has no useful function and demands renunciation – have in a certain sense a closer affinity to the psychoanalytic perspective than the Platonic or Aristotelian view that anger has its uses when kept in bounds. Seneca’s vivid portrayal of anger as a force with its own fatal momentum gets much nearer to its drive character than Aristotle’s notion of a judicious or proportionate anger. The wholesale repudiation of anger follows from the insight that anger is inherently excessive. Angry feelings may seek satisfaction, but there is always some doubt as to what, if anything, will satisfy them. In insisting that it be channelled wholesale into righting the wrongs that provoke it, Nussbaum misconceives the essential logic of anger.
Anger becomes a structural force, a permanent body political source of urgent agitation for change
The American philosopher Agnes Callard seems to edge much closer to that logic in her essay ‘On Anger’ (2020), which sees the stubborn indelibility of anger as its defining characteristic. Anger, she argues, is as permanent as the offences that provoke it; steal from me, and you will have stolen from me irrevocably. Whatever restitutive efforts you might make to assuage my anger, the original theft cannot be undone; thus, ‘once you have a reason to be angry, you have a reason to be angry forever.’
We might wish to object to Callard that the afterlife of an injury unfolds in the fluid and changeable medium of memory and in live relationships. While reparative efforts cannot change what was done to me, they can change the meaning and significance they hold. The remorse and restitution of the offender may well lower my estimation of the offence’s gravity. But can this prospect of pacification and forgiveness avoid what we might call the Achillean roadblock?
Were Nussbaum to propose to Achilles that the thief’s restitutive efforts easily nullify the grounds of his anger, he would respond with a derisive snort. Via the embassy of warriors led by Nestor, after all, Agamemnon offers Achilles recompense wildly exceeding the one concubine he took from him. Not only will he return Briseïs, Odysseus assures Achilles, but he’ll throw in a dazzling array of gifts: abundant gold, prize horses, skilled and beautiful women, fertile cities and one of his own daughters for a bride. For the tradition from which Nussbaum speaks, anger can be satisfied by a specific quantum of reparative action. But for Achilles, the meaning of his anger is precisely that it cannot be satisfied, that no restitutive gesture could be adequate to it. Agamemnon’s initial injury has opened a wound of humiliation for which there is no remedy.
To say that anger is impelled by the force of the drive is to say it has no straight path to satisfaction, that it cannot be sure what it seeks or demands. This is why it is liable, as Seneca observes, to be carried by its own momentum into gratuitously destructive action.
In his study of the politics and economy of thymos, the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk argues that rage has both shaped and derailed the course of Western history precisely through its refusal of any logic of balance and proportion. With the thymos of Achilles explicitly in mind, he points out that the West’s cherished remedies for bringing to a halt the ‘endless pendulum of hit and retaliation’, from private spiritual exercises to public justice to foreign policy, are liable to run up against their own limits:
just as a festering wound can become both a chronic and general malady, psychic and moral wounds also may not heal, which creates its own corrupt temporality, the infinity of an unanswered complaint.
Once we understand anger to be an expression of the drive, ‘the infinity of an unanswered complaint’ becomes a permanent possibility. The implications of this understanding for the conduct of social and political life are forbiddingly large. More than one feeling among others, anger becomes a structural force, a permanent body political source of urgent agitation for change (Black Lives Matter), and enervated resistance to disruption (Blue Lives Matter) in the structure of society and the texture of everyday experience.
Is there a source of anger more immediate and violent than the raw force of biological need? Necessity – hunger, cold, acute pain – ensures that the pressure exerted by a drive is absolute and immediate. It is under the compulsion of necessity that we most keenly feel our original helplessness, and that anger is consequently most liable to escape all our efforts to bring it under control and assume the force of an infinitely unanswered complaint.
History suggests this is as true for mass political as for individual emotional life, as Hannah Arendt has shown above all. In On Revolution (1963), Arendt seeks to account for why the French Revolution (and almost all subsequent revolutions) ultimately descended into unbounded terror.
For Arendt, the most basic condition of life is human solidarity – that is, a common space for the engagement of contesting voices. The primary enemy of solidarity is thus that form of human misery peculiar to unsatisfied biological needs, which press upon us with a violence Arendt calls ‘prepolitical’. The conduct of politics assumes its participants are fed and sheltered. Where this assumption is not met, these elemental needs become the motive force of political action, and need can find public expression only in violence. Once the force of elemental necessity was let loose into political life, writes Arendt, ‘the malhereux changed into the enragés, for rage is indeed the only form in which misfortune can become active.’
There is a violent and unedifying history of movements Left and Right exploiting the drive character of anger
The enragés come into being when the poor and hungry can endure their suffering no longer, when, in the language of psychoanalysis, the pressure of the drive has reached its highest pitch. The enragés are the fruit of a despair of attaining satisfaction by any other means, a despair that finally licensed and impelled Robespierre’s limitless Reign of Terror in the 1790s. ‘This rage,’ Arendt writes:
carries with it the momentum of true suffering, whose devastating force is superior and, as it were, more enduring than the raging frenzy of mere frustration.
Rage is the annulment of any political process. It is hard to imagine an insight more resonant with our own moment. Not for nothing did the 2016 Trump campaign, in an ingenious strike against Hillary Clinton’s widely perceived elitism, doctor the iconographic poster of Les Misérables, transforming Victor Hugo’s Paris Commune ragged fighters and flags into the rowdy band of the MAGA faithful – Les Deplorables. And yet the reference is ambiguous to say the least. If it invokes the Commune, it also insinuates a chasm of ironic distance from it. Our moment, the Trump poster implies, is less a revolutionary spring than a cynical parody of one, a mobilisation of rage with no determinate aim or object.
Robespierre’s Terror was the culmination of a zealous rage that could only consume itself along with its targets. The demagogic politics of Trump and Brexit recognises that rage, and makes of it an endlessly renewable resource. It does not need to achieve its stated aims – to build a border wall or provide the best access to cheap healthcare, for example. In fact, it is far more politically advantageous for the base to be maintained in a state of mounting dissatisfaction that can be handily blamed on its vast array of enemies and discharged when expedient in the most dangerous quantities – at Charlottesville in August 2017, say, or at the US Capitol in January 2021.
There is, then, a violent and unedifying history of political movements Left and Right exploiting the drive character of anger – harnessing its pressure, directing or manipulating its aims, switching its objects (immigrants, Democrats, experts) in accordance with the needs of the political moment. In private and public life alike, the destructive potential of anger is rooted in its drive character. Anger is always at risk of being propelled to a level of pressure it cannot sustain. The uncertainty of its aims and objects makes it perpetually vulnerable to external manipulation as well as blind action.
And yet, if the drive character of anger is dangerous, it can also be peculiarly enriching. Precisely because its aims and objects are changeable and uncertain, it is capable of a questioning curiosity towards itself. Because they arouse feelings I cannot master and desires I cannot satisfy, drives make me strange to myself. That strangeness, as we’ve seen, makes us ripe for emotional manipulation at the individual as much as the collective level – if we always knew exactly what we wanted, we couldn’t be manipulated into wanting something else. But it also makes possible the kinds of self-reflection facilitated by art, philosophy and science – of which psychoanalysis is at once all and none.
If there is a basis for a distinction between destructive and just anger, it surely lies here. The rhetorical style of Trump and his avatars rests on the elimination of even the smallest hint of self-doubt, a tendency that becomes more total the more its content outrages truth and human decency. Trump’s refusal to recant or correct one of his numberless proven falsehoods, like the continued denial by Congressional Republicans of the abundantly documented violence of the January 6th insurrectionists, are prime instances of a strictly enforced embargo on self-examination.
Authoritarian and demagogic anger derives its force from a refusal to question itself. It feeds not on propositions but on the assertion of an undivided and incontestable reality, which the demagogue alone has the right to describe. It is an anger that can never confront or question itself, that expresses itself as though it knows with immaculate certainty its own aims and objects. This is the spirit of Achillean anger, the blindly righteous outrage of a man robbed of a woman he himself has robbed.
As Arendt showed us, this tone of self-certainty is as endemic to the history of the revolutionary Left as of the reactionary Right. Authentic and meaningful political anger, as opposed to the confected anger of dictators and populist leaders, must include within itself a kind of vigilant self-suspicion. We see an instance of this self-suspicion in the work of the Black feminist theorist and activist Audre Lorde, who writes in her essay ‘The Uses of Anger’ (1981): ‘I have tried to learn my anger’s usefulness to me, as well as its limitations.’
The annals of history are stalked by sufficient injustice, brutality and stupidity to feed our lifelong anger
When anger is examined from inside a self-suspecting practice of thinking and feeling, its momentum is slowed and made available for observation, reflection and play. I am wary of making this sound like a simple matter, when few things could be more difficult. I cannot listen to the sinister amalgam of cruelty and nonsense streaming from Trump and his acolytes without becoming severely enervated with rage. It is hard to imagine any witness to the murder of George Floyd, or any other of the innumerable offences against racial justice of recent years and decades and centuries, taking reflective distance from the burning anger they feel. The annals of history are stalked by sufficient injustice, brutality and stupidity to feed our lifelong anger.
But the peculiar advantage of art and psychoanalysis (which may well be construed, from the standpoint of philosophical reason or scientific objectivity, as a disadvantage) is that they provide ways of experiencing such extreme feelings while making them available to curiosity and open exploration.
In the course of our years of work, Gordon came to feel relief that I could receive his rages without falling prey to the twin temptations of dismissal and retaliation, as though a different mode of relating had been opened up for him, one not defined by the same compulsive panic. Psychoanalysis slowly and falteringly mitigated his tendencies to reactive panic and its snowballing consequences. I think this change was facilitated above all by the dual stance of psychoanalytic work, which meant he could at once feel his anger and sit alongside it, remaining inside it while wondering about it from a short distance.
Reading the Iliad or Medea is a very different experience, it has a similarly doubling effect on us, situating us both inside and apart from the passionate furies of the protagonists. Perhaps this doubled position, beyond surrender to it and beyond the illusion that we could simply abandon it, is our best hope of learning to live with anger – our own and everyone else’s.
To read more on the history of emotions, visit Psyche, a digital magazine from Aeon that illuminates the human condition through psychology, philosophy and the arts.
Mood and emotionHuman rights and justicePsychiatry and psychotherapy
We are no longer observers of the distressed futures that afflict other people. We are those people now.
Peter Maass January 6 2022 (TheIntercept.com)
Law enforcement use a smoke grenade to push back protesters at the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021.
Photo: Eric Lee/Bloomberg/Getty Images
IT WAS THE winter of 1991, and the country I was working in, the Soviet Union, was months away from its demise. Yet the collapse, so close, was unimaginable.
Moscow was frigid and miserable. The currency was a wreck, stores had empty shelves, and the Kremlin seemed more of a ghost ship than command center. The country’s Baltic republics were seeking independence, and when I reported on the violence that had already occurred there, struggle and darkness were all that seemed possible.
I was visiting the Soviet Union to help my overworked colleagues from the Washington Post, and on one of my first nights, I had dinner with a few correspondents who lived in the country and knew what was going on — or were supposed to. They talked of a grim era ahead in which the KGB and the Soviet Army would rule the country, because its leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was losing control; his reforms unleashed only discontent and poverty.
A few years later, after the Soviet Union was no more, I wrote about that dinner and what would have occurred if I had known the future and told my friends about it. “If I would have suggested that, in six months, hard-liners might stage a coup against Gorbachev, and that the coup would fail and that the Soviet Union, which we all had grown up with and believed to be immortal, would die on the spot, breaking into bits and pieces with names like Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, my colleagues would have laughed and wondered whether my water glass was filled with vodka.”
The astounding thing isn’t that every warning light was flashing red in the winter of 1991 and we didn’t see them. We saw those lights. Everyone did. We couldn’t miss them. We knew there was danger. The astounding thing is that we couldn’t imagine their submerged meaning, the future they indicated.
One year after the storming of the U.S. Congress, it’s a good time to recognize that we are no longer observers of the distressed futures that afflict other people. We are those people now. It is we, not the out-of-luck them, who are at the mercy of nightmares. So today is a good day to understand what that means.
A Lithuanian demonstrator runs in front of a Soviet tank during an assault on the Lithuanian Radio and Television station in Vilnius, Lithuania, on Jan. 13, 1991.
Photo: Andre Durand/AFP/Getty Images
I am a glutton for dystopia. While covering the war in Bosnia, I read J.G. Ballard’s “High-Rise,” a 1970s novel about a luxury apartment building in London where the residents devolve into war against each other, begun by a dispute over a loud party. I can’t remember why I chose to read Ballard, but the first sentences of “High-Rise” spoke to what I was learning in the Balkans about the ways societies slip, without knowing it, into the realm of nightmares:
Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months. Now that everything had returned to normal, he was surprised that there had been no obvious beginning, no point beyond which their lives had moved into a clearly more sinister dimension.
Even as Sarajevo suffered its first casualties in April 1992, during a peace march, lots of people still couldn’t see what was in front of them: a genocidal war by Serbs against Muslims. There were plenty of flashing red lights before the shooting started, years before it started, in fact — the death of Yugoslav ruler Josip Broz Tito; the publication of a nationalist tract by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts; the rise of Slobodan Milošević — but what did these things mean, what was the future they foretold?
These questions lead me to another book I read during my time in the Balkans, this one about the Balkans. Though Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” is a classic that was published in 1941 and elicits some groans nowadays for its Serbian orientation, it has a line from its narrator that remains a truth bomb: “In writing this book I have been struck again and again by the refusal of destiny to let man see what is happening to him, its mean delight in strewing his path with red herrings.” These red herrings are somewhat universal: the plans we have, the dreams we covet, the delusions we nurture.
It would be wrong to punish ourselves over our inability to see the future. Who could be expected to realize that it wasn’t just a reality TV star but the next president of the United States who rode down an escalator at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015, and implausibly announced, as he described Mexicans as rapists, that he wanted to be the 45th commander in chief? For that matter, how could a young reporter in Budapest in 1990 foresee that the cool 20-something anti-communist activist he interviewed from time to time, just elected to parliament, would become a racist and antisemitic prime minister one day? (The cool kid was Viktor Orbán, and the young reporter was me.)
Red herrings, everywhere.
Bosnian soldiers engage in house-to-house fighting in Sarajevo on June 24, 1992.
Photo: Morten Hvaal/ Rapport/Newscom
The warning lights have been flashing in America for a long time. We could start in 1619 or 1789 and jump forward 200 years to Lee Atwater, Ronald Reagan, and Rush Limbaugh, for instance. What I saw in the Balkans makes me think the emergence of Fox News in 1996 was the trigger mechanism for our current predicament. It’s hard to overstate the necessity, if your goal is national madness, of mainstreaming racism and hatred — a function that was fulfilled by Radio Television of Serbia before the Bosnia war.
The late Miloš Vasić, one of the most fearless journalists in Serbia during the 1990s, chronicled his homeland’s descent into extremism and corruption. Vasić knew that the great unwinding in the former Yugoslavia was not a unique phenomenon. “All it took was a few years of fierce, reckless, chauvinist, intolerant, expansionist, war-mongering propaganda to create enough hate to start the fighting among people who had lived together peacefully for 45 years,” he said in 1993. “You must imagine a United States with every little TV station everywhere taking exactly the same editorial line — a line dictated by David Duke. You, too, would have war in five years.”
The Murdoch family, which owns Fox News, has required more than five years to create an actual war in the U.S., but the network’s millionaire hosts are not without results, and they remain hard at work encouraging their mostly white viewers to be the worst they can be and feel like patriots. I think Vasić, who died last year, would have a lot of wisdom to share about our January 6 anniversary, and some of it would revolve around Americans finally seeing they are not the well-mannered exception to internal calamity that they liked to believe themselves to be.
While it’s too much to expect we can foretell our future, we can know from the multitude of flashing lights that we have slipped into what Ballard would instantly diagnose as a sinister dimension. And our journey is not complete. Aleksandar Hemon, the Bosnian American writer, put it well: “What the actual resolution might look like, I fear to envision, but I know it will not resemble anything Americans can remember or dare to imagine.”
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“I think, therefore I am” is perhaps the most famous phrase in the history of Western philosophy. Most people have heard it, many know what it means, but fewer still are aware of the myriad debates surrounding its meaning, translation, and success. I certainly wasn’t before encountering it at university, where I chose to specialise in early modern philosophy. This video is an introduction to “the cogito”, as it is often called, and a brief exploration of some of the debates that surround it. (A note: I refer to a horse and a horn as a Humean “simple idea” – this is not quite right: a simple idea is one which cannot be broken down into further simple ideas (such as colours, smells, etc.). To explain this nuance would have been an irrelevant detour, and the point ought still carry. A unicorn is, to correctly invoke Hume, a complex idea made up of further complex ideas, made up of simple ideas, which originate in simple impressions.) (Note 2: Some empiricists will claim that knowledge comes *primarily* from our sense data, allowing for some limited a priori knowledge, and still call themselves empiricists.)
—————RECOMMENDED READING—————-
René Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy” (meditations one and two): https://amzn.to/32SiBZd John Cottingham, “Descartes” (chapter 2): https://amzn.to/3t8dv5M Georges Dicker, “Descartes: An Analytical And Historical Introduction” (chapters 1-2): https://amzn.to/3HAv6re Peter Markie, “The Cogito and its Importance”, reprinted in the Cambridge Companion to Descartes: https://amzn.to/3ePTuZH Also relevant: For more information on rationalism – John Cottingham, “The Rationalists”: https://amzn.to/336jEo5 David Hume’s epistemology is mentioned, which can be read about in his “A Treatise of Human Nature”, Book I, Part 1 and Book I, Part III §5: https://amzn.to/3380K0p Baron Reed’s example of psychological certainty is taken from his SEP entry, “Certainty”: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ce…
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0:00 Introduction 1:05 1: Rationalism 3:58 2: The Evil Demon 6:36 3: The Cogito 10:16 4: Deduction or Intuition? 15:30 5: A Mistranslation of Descartes? 18:35 6: Certainty vs Truth 20:43 Closing
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As always, I would like to direct extra gratitude to my top-tier patrons: Itamar Lev Evan Allen Faraz Harsini John Early Sveline Teymour Beydoun Adam Gray Nolan Kent Seth Balodi Citizens of Civilization James Davis
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Yesterday 3:56PM (TheOnion.com)
WASHINGTON—Nervously fiddling with their new white belts as they waited for their instructor in the training hall, U.S. Congress members reportedly prepared for another Jan. 6 on Thursday by participating in a group class at the D.C.-area True Method Karate Studio. “We simply cannot allow what happened last year to ever repeat itself, which is why from now on we’ll be meeting up once a week to study the martial art of karate with Howard-sensei,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who stood barefoot on the dōjō mat among his fellow lawmakers, practicing making a seiken proper fist before moving through a variety of basic stances. “After last Jan. 6, we just felt so powerless and humiliated. This will be a great way to not only gain back our confidence, but be ready to defend ourselves with kicks, punches, and blocks in the event there’s ever another insurrection. Plus, it’s a whole lot of fun!” At press time, sources confirmed the class was seething with envy after Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) became the first to receive his yellow belt.
FM2030Videos FM-2030 appears on Larry King Live to discuss his book, Are You A Transhuman? Interview took place in 1989.
Men represented by this card are complex and powerful beings. They are self-contained – even secretive – giving an impression of calmness and serenity. However under that veneer they can often be intense and volatile. They tend to hide their deepest passions, and to protect them fiercely.
They are often creative – artistically or musically inclined, and have deep involvement in these areas. Many of the more successful artists and musicians in our lives would come up as a Prince of Cups.
Emotionally they can sometimes be turbulent and moody, but can also often hide their emotions and refuse to share them with others. However, having a highly developed sensitivity to emotional ups and downs, they will identify yours even before you have. Talking to somebody like this about emotional matters is usually a rewarding experience, because they are highly perceptive and use their intuition readily.
If this card comes up to indicate an alteration in a person’s behaviour, it will generally indicate a man moving into a new romantic relationship and feeling somewhat troubled by this. The Knight is the card that comes up to indicate a man happily falling in love.
Look for surrounding cards to clarify whether any misgivings are justified – for instance, the Moon or the Seven of Cups would be warnings of danger; also look at whether cards like the Seven of Swords or the Seven of Disks come up – these may indicate inner personal worries that will only cause problems if allowed to.
(via angelpaths.com and Alan Blackman)