Dysphoria, vulnerability and identity - An eulogy for anger

Compared with the bulk of psychiatric literature dedicated to sadness or eu phoria, dysphoric states have received relatively little attention. Perhaps we find ourselves facing a removal of anger from the horizon of contempora ry psychopathology. Even less attention is given to the 'doublets' of anger . Anger marks off a region of the psyche within which the game of identity is played: as indignation, it defends the limits of that which is tolerable , the border upon which to keep watch, the trench from which to fight. But as fury, in the excess of the absolute affirmation of one's own existence, it incarnates the wreckage and the bloody fall of identity - i.e. pathology . The topic then collects the interweaving of the subjectivising character of rage on the one side, and on the other the explosive one, which breaks u p the unifying and conciliatory direction which rationality enforces upon t he subject - 'anger of life' and 'anger of death'. Both dimensions are expl ored with special concern to the reason for empathising with anger. Copyrig ht (C) 2000 S. Karger AG, Basel.