ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explores angry people. She turns specifically to anger and to make a working distinction for the sake of her argument between anger and rage. No need for anger or sadness or for doubt about doing the right thing: no need for all the powerful feelings that, as common sense tells us, may well rise to the surface. One of the features of infantile anger or rage is its inability to distinguish between violent feelings and violent action. The children were the inheritors of generations of deprivation and anger. Children brought up in a violent household are asked to endure excess of terror. A catalogue of severe problems emerged: drug-dealing, drug-taking, theft, domestic violence between the parents, concerns about the children’s present placements with aunt and grandmother. A tantrum is what children suffer when their whole system of managing their feelings collapses.
