VSsome people, after adopting a cat, find it normal to ask their veterinarian to operate on it to remove its claws. Their goal is no doubt to make their animal as harmless to their armchairs as if it were a stuffed animal, but they seem to forget that, nature having not without reason endowed living cats with claws, to use its power to depriving them amounts to nothing more or less than inflicting on them a violence, one of those that animals so often suffer when humans, because they think they own them – as they would be of objects –, arrogate to themselves the right to condemn them to an existence that no longer has anything to do with what they need.
Similarly, some psychiatric professionals advocate removing anger from human heads, starting in childhood (probably considering that, in the world of “good feelings” they promote, it “messes up” ), which obviously constitutes, here too, violence.
Why is forbidding anger violent?
Anger is the expression of a revolt in the face of words or actions which, in addition to being painful, have for those who undergo them, because they consider them abnormal or unfair, the value of aggression.
The feeling of abnormality and injustice felt can be justified by reality (if the motorist driving in front of me had not been busy phoning, he would have seen that he had to slow down and would not have caused the pile-up which spoils my holidays), but it may also not be: the small child, for example, often imagines the table in which he has bumped into himself as an enemy who has come to get in his way; or the parent who does not allow him to do whatever he wants, like an unjust executioner. And he needs, to calm his anger, that someone explains to him that the space in which he circulates involves dangers, which he must learn to avoid. And that the limits he encounters are only a simple application of the common law: however big and strong they may be, adults too must, like him, respect it.
How to explain the violence of certain anger?
The violence of anger is often attributed to the problem – even the pathology – of the person who expresses it. Wrongly, because it can also be proportional to the way in which the event which provokes it has done violence to this person, either because it was really violent (certain words, for example, are more destructive than they look), or because he came to reopen childhood wounds in her home. In this case, the anger expressed is double because to that of the adult is then added, unbeknownst to this adult, that experienced in the past by the child he was.
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