The Politics of Anger: Putin and the psychology of rage

Abstract

The Politics of AngerPutin and the psychology of rage Josh Cohen (bio) it's just gone 7 a.m. in my consulting room. I'm staring into the thin powder blue of the early March sky as the day's first patient readies himself on the couch. I look over, notice the taut knotting of his brow, the tight squeeze of his lowered eyelids, and feel the air between us thicken. Gerard* is beset by physical and emotional afflictions that stick to each other like a codependent couple. Crippling headaches and [End Page 57] insomnia merge into his fear of being consigned to permanent, irremediable loneliness. He then frequently discharges this double malaise in breathless monologues, fraught with panic and rage. Gerard begins by telling me it's just not working with Amanda, the woman he's been seeing for the last couple of months. He's tried to tell her what it's like, carrying these pounding headaches through the working day, practically hallucinating after another sleepless night, but she doesn't really get it. Barely two months and she's already fed up, and who can blame her? He goes on to rail against the dating apps he's forced to use, and their steady drip-feed of misinformation—out-of-date pictures, misleading self-descriptions, sometimes outright lies. Whom does any of it benefit beyond the platforms themselves, venal parasites on human vulnerability? I can feel his breath quicken, his blood heating as he inveighs against people's preference to present themselves as generic fictions online rather than as fleshly human beings in the real world. And then he moves on to me, sitting there smugly, no doubt possessed of a lovely wife and adorable children, feeling sorry for him. Well, he doesn't need my pity, he won't be patronized. Speaking of which, did I see Boris Johnson's puffed-up speech in Parliament yesterday? How do the people of this country tolerate that hideous tone of entitled condescension? He wants to grab a big tuft of BoJo's mussy blond hair and bang his fucking forehead on the desk till his skull cracks. A nice textbook interpretation of Gerard's behavior ought to be brewing at the back of my mind, perhaps built on the observation that he pivots to Johnson as a way of redirecting the violence he'd like to inflict on me. But his rage sends me instead to images of Vladimir Putin, tank battalions advancing, and frightened mothers pushing strollers across the rubble of their flattened homes. It's as if Gerard's rant concentrates something of the inexorable momentum of rage that suffuses politics today—the rage to make war on neighboring countries, on migrants, social-media adversaries, health advisors, welfare claimants—the diffuse and boundless [End Page 58] rage that feeds, and feeds off, itself. It is there in the targets of Gerard's ire: women's autonomy, the reign of misinformation, the nerve-shredding speed of a 24/7 culture, the soul-crushing impersonality and rootlessness of the virtual world, the casual corruptions of the political class—all motifs Russia has enlisted in the effort to open and infect the wounds of Western civil society and corrode its already worn democratic norms. I reproach myself silently. "What has this got to do with anything? Don't wander off. Stay with him." But the images of global conflict defiantly refuse to disperse, as though insisting on their own relevance. And Gerard's anger makes me want to scream, to scream at him or with him, to discharge some tiny portion of the massive agitation he sends through my clogged mind and enervated body, saturated as they are with the violence in the room and in the world beyond. And if this scream could speak, it might say, What the hell is going on? ________ to answer that question, it might be useful to think of Gerard's unexceptional middle-aged discontents and the unbound aggression of Putin and the Russian military as two instances, albeit of radically different orders of magnitude, of the operation of what psychoanalysis calls the drive. There is some resistance in contemporary psychoanalysis...