Therapy and Emotions in Film and Television The Pulse of Our Times (Claudia Wassmann (eds.)) (z-lib.org)

38 Peter N. Stearns emotions that might spill over. And if a spouse did become angry, his partner was urged to remember that this was just a sign of insecurity, not something that must be taken seriously. The guilty party, inevit- ably, was the person who became angry, not the person or situation that provoked it. Thus, by the second half of the twentieth century, a range of standards existed urging that anger be kept under wraps. With rare exceptions – for example, a family manual for African Americans that allowed the legitimacy of anger against racial injustice – no good use for anger was found at all in the prescriptive literature that predominated for the growing American middle-class. Since then, the efforts against anger have solidified and rami- fied in a number of ways, often with measurable impacts on American behaviors. Training efforts for middle-management have continued, though under a variety of faddish labels. Total Quality Management, popular in the 1990s, emphasized ‘interactive skills’ training that avoided provoking others, with specific injunctions against ‘Defending/Attacking behavior,’ seen as ‘making personal attacks, moving away from issues, and becoming emotional.’ Temper control was a core ingredient of the whole movement. Anger control moved more clearly into the classroom. Teachers who voiced anger against students or even used strident criticism were subject to rebuke. Emphasis rested increasingly on appealing to student self-esteem, rather than using emotions now seen as entirely negative.2 Intriguing campaigns attempted to persuade Americans that they were angrier than they actually were. Again in the 1990s, the iden- tification of ‘road rage’ involved personality tests designed to make drivers worry that even moderately annoyed behavior – the occa- sional car honk – was a sign of incipient aggression. In point of fact, anger on the roadways was no greater than before, and indeed traf- fic-derived shootings had been more of a problem a decade prior. But well-meaning officials were constantly eager to find new ways to persuade Americans to keep their tempers in check, whether the problem was real or imagined. Road rage was a term that identified a real but not very common problem, while serving as a warning that anger lessons must not be forgotten. The overall program spilled over into law and politics. In law, the rise of the no-fault divorce movement represented an attempt,

American Anger Control, the Role of Popular Culture 39 among other things, to reduce emotional tensions, including anger, around the breakup of marriage and to provide an opportunity to arrange marital termination without angry discord. In politics, new rituals emerged designed among other things to test candidates’ capacity for temper control. Presidential debates sometimes featured provocative questions, with candidates fully aware that a display of temper in response would symbolize emotional unreliability. Plenty of hot-tempered candidates still hit the trails, but at the national level their emotional frailties were kept carefully under wraps. Smiles, not outrage, were the emotional coinage of politics. The same held for political appointees. Robert Reich, coming to Washington as Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor, was earnestly advised that at all costs he should avoid any sign of anger, which would be seized upon as a fatal weakness. Reasonably systematic anger control and emotional maturity were fully identified. Larger data sets also suggested the impact of anger control. A comparative study, juxtaposing the United States with Greece, Jamaica, China, and several other cases, revealed Americans as particularly likely to wish to conceal any anger. Chinese, despite remnants of Confucian decorum, were noticeably more comfortable in identifying some positive functions for anger. The comparative point is both revealing and tricky: the need to conceal suggests that many Americans (unlike people who have been studied in more fully anger-free societies, like some Inuit Eskimo groups) have not managed to expel the emotion entirely. But many of them have learned the lessons about exposing weak- ness or immaturity by expressing anger too openly – hence the desire to conceal.3 The campaigns against anger, certainly in terms of personnel management and possibly as a result of altered socialization as well, spilled over into the protest arena. The massive decline of labor strikes and union activities from the 1950s onward (with a brief new spike in the later 1960s) followed from changes in the labor force and location of industry, but the new sense that overt anger was an inappropriate tool may well have been involved. Trade unions picked up the message directly: a United Auto Workers pamphlet was urging, as early as the 1940s, that ‘a lost temper means a lost argument’. Calm negotiation might still win gains, but the glory days of fiery leadership seemed to have passed. Another component here involved

40 Peter N. Stearns the more careful behavior of foremen themselves; as personal griev- ances on the job noticeably declined, greater care was being taken to avoid generating, as well as expressing, anger, even if other aspects of labor conditions actually deteriorated. New protest movements often picked up notes of caution about anger as well, lest their efforts seem irresponsible or immature. Feminist leaders were eager to train women in greater assertiveness, but they went to some lengths to distinguish this from anger. Youth protesters in the 1960s, though often angry in fact, operated under mantras urging love, not conflict. We return to the protest arena in a later section, but there is no ques- tion that several established protest modes, particularly on the labor front, were complicated by the new bias against open anger (Smith, 1946: 119). Even marriage, many experts argued by the 1970s, reflected the new signals in odd, sometimes counterproductive ways. Many marriage authorities contended that anger had become a problem not so much in direct fights, as in spousal embarrassment at their own inappropriate emotion. Temper problems began to escalate in complaints about spousal character flaws, but there was more. As one expert put it, ‘their [the spouses’] problem isn’t that they are angry with each other; it’s that they think they should not be angry with each other.’ Anger control could create some complex adjustment problems, beginning with self-evaluation (Landis & Landis, 1953: 292). On another front, though a bit more speculative: a number of observers have argued that the growing acceptability of cursing in later-twentieth-century America reflected the increasing confidence that the words did not contain much if any real anger. They provided minor relief at most, not any serious threat of aggression, because all parties could trust each other that basic control standards still applied. Anger control could go so far as to create real confusion about one’s own authentic emotions. Arlie Hochschild’s famous study of emotional training on the job – The Managed Heart – showed how flight attendants, carefully schooled in smiling reactions to passenger complaints, often lost the capacity, even in their free time, to figure out whether they were really angry or not. Meanwhile personnel tests were increasingly honed to help identify angry, and therefore unacceptable, job candidates – another reason for young people and

American Anger Control, the Role of Popular Culture 41 parents to redouble their effort to prevent anger, or its open expres- sion, in the first place. Finally – though measuring cognitive discomfort is inherently unsystematic – training in anger avoidance or concealment made many people more vulnerable to unease, even outright distress, when they encountered anger nevertheless. Anger in the family could thus cause tremendous upset simply because it seemed both unwarranted and unfamiliar. The following quotations from family members encountering anger made the point clearly: ‘I’d get so upset, I’d throw up and not be able to eat.’ ‘When she comes after me like that, yapping like that, she might as well be hitting me with a bat’ (Baldwin, 1979: 143). In the workplace a new concern about bullying – which first surfaced in the 1920s, and then re-emerged strongly in the early twenty-first century – reflected personal discomfort at encountering angry behavior, and a need to enlist help from Human Resources quarters rather than trying to confront the emotional challenge directly. Here again was a stark contrast with nineteenth-century norms, when the capacity to stand up directly to bullies was a desired test of boyhood and incipient manhood. At least in many quarters, during the late twentieth and early twenty- first century, there was little joy either in giving or receiving the classic emotion of anger. The American movement against anger, a clear innovation compared to late-nineteenth-century norms, has thus operated over several decades, with diverse manifestations and significant impact, from new goals in children’s socialization to new behaviors in public as well as on the job. Periodic laments about anger levels were actu- ally part of the process of trying to convince Americans to strive for fuller control. Contemporary American discomfort with anger, in self and others, ran quite high. It is important to reiterate that the goals were quite ambitious: It was not a matter of defining anger stand- ards or simply preventing anger from spilling over into violence, as has been identified in French culture; rather, the emotion was to be avoided altogether, or at the least fully concealed. This was a demanding criterion, particularly in a culture that, previously, had positively valued the emotion when properly directed. Small wonder that many Americans remained uncertain about the results. Small wonder, as well, that pockets of exception further complicated the overall picture.

42 Peter N. Stearns Gaps in anger control For there were important gaps and blind spots in the anger control campaigns. The real national problems related to anger rested not in lack of vigor or impact, but in several identifiable exceptions and inconsistencies, and this remains a key source of the confusion about the whole effort. The movement against anger is still relatively new and far from entirely systematic, and important groups – quite apart from individual personalities – maintain rather distinctive subcul- tures, at some distance from the widespread pressure to keep the fires of emotion banked. We will see that some of the key complexities, along with the rigorous principles of the anger control campaign itself, spill over into the uses of popular media. All societies have rules about anger, and surely all exhibit some level of inconsistency. Even in Jean Briggs’ famous treatment of the Utku Eskimos, the ‘people without anger’ who have no words for the emotion and full intolerance for it after infancy, her subject routinely mistreat dogs and other animals – to an outsider observer showing every sign of venting on helpless creatures an emotion which they’re taught not to express among themselves (Briggs, 1970). If anomalies of this sort crop up in a relatively small and simple society, they are even more likely to show up in a large society like that of the United States, filled as it is with a mixture of subcultures. Without pretending to handle all the variants, we can identify several important strands. Again, the categories do not invalidate the campaign we have outlined – indeed, they flourish in part because the campaign has wide impact – but they unquestionably add further ingredients to the story of American anger in recent history. There’s a rich field here for further research. Ethnic subcultures would be an obvious target. We know that many immigrant groups bring in different historical anger standards. Mediterraneans, for example, have measurably distinctive anger reactions, and it would be good to know how these interact with the American immigrant experience. Surely the mixture fuels ongoing perceptions of American anger, and possibly some of the emotional reality as well. Two other exceptional categories can already be noted, and both unquestionably contribute to the overall emotional mosaic. Evangelical Protestants form one clear strand; professional exceptions constitute the other. Historians have long since recognized that, alongside the proces- sion of emotional cultures that emerged in the American middle

American Anger Control, the Role of Popular Culture 43 classes from the late eighteenth century onward, a persistent strand of Evangelical Christianity stood apart (Greven, 1977). Anger was one of the key differentiators. From their colonial roots onward, Evangelicals have developed an ambivalent stance on anger. Anger is to be suppressed in the sight of God, and overt childish anger is a sign of sin. Rigorous discipline manages to keep anger at bay in the family as well as in relationship to the religious hierarchy, but the same process actually encourages anger, and angry intoler- ance, against outside targets. At various points over the past 200-plus years, Evangelical anger against unbelievers variously defined has poured forth as an earthly vessel for the wrath of God, all the more powerful as it channels emotions that cannot be expressed in other contexts, from childhood onward. This longstanding Evangelical current was fueled by a wider anger in some quarters, after the 1960s, over growing evidence of national moral lapse and by a rising sense of a loss of control over public culture and, ultimately, global influences alike. Any emotion was legitimate in protesting the downward slide. The legalization of abor- tion attracted much of the new rage, but pornography, homosexu- ality, immigration, all the targets of the so-called conservative social agenda, were available as well. Unchained anger and vituperation dominated the new genre of the rightwing talk show, and it stood in vivid contrast to the emotional rules many other Americans were internalizing at least in part. The result was a fascinating cleavage in American political emotions. Mainstream politicians, and liberal representatives more generally, have largely internalized the invo- cations to keep anger under wraps. With rare exceptions, since the 1960s, few large protest movements in the United States have gener- ated great emotion on the political left, in part at least because of the widespread association between anger and immaturity. But these rules have applied far less completely to the rightwing side of the house, where emotion-based protest has in some ways flourished more fully than ever before. The bifurcation was fascinating, and it contributed greatly to the growing national sense of cultural divide. Several power categories have also claimed, and to some extent won, partial exemption from the standard rules on anger control. Two seem particularly interesting and significant. First: some busi- ness, government and academic leaders managed to find ways around the prevailing emotional work rules, at least once they had risen nearer the top. Once in power, in other words, they might

44 Peter N. Stearns decide the common standards no longer applied to them. Many a corporate or university bigwig, while organizing anger seminars to guide subordinates, freely used anger themselves to discipline some of these same subordinates. Here was a frequent source of pressure on middle managers, expected to control their own anger and keep a lid on the emotions of employees, while enduring a different kind of emotional pressure from above, from outbursts that were at once unfair (by the common rules) and unassailable (because of the power differential). By the 1990s a term had been introduced for this anom- alous executive rage: ‘going ballistic’ – clearly a confounding factor in the relationship between normal emotional criteria and the hier- archies of American society. The second self-authorization also involved power, though at more varied organizational levels. At least two leadership situ- ations largely sustained a use of anger that was quite different from the more widely touted standards. Music directors, from school orchestras on up, frequently used anger as a means of discipline and motivation – in ways ordinary teachers could not possibly get by with. Coaches, even more widely, routinely used anger, and their charges not only accepted this but often expected it. A group of school oarsmen thus complained about a new coxswain: ‘she keeps trying to praise us, but she’s supposed to be yelling and chewing us out.’4 Sports, more widely, provides a situation in which anger control frequently broke down, as athletes took to the field the same emotions coaches displayed on the sidelines. To be sure, the exceptions were debated. A few coaches were disci- plined for carrying anger too far, particularly in outright physical attacks on their charges; a few boasted that they were ‘new style’, and used praise rather than temper to spur excellence – though in the privacy of practice sessions it turned out that some were not as fully reformed as they claimed. Other exceptional categories might be added: surgeons, for example, had a level of self-importance that might seem to authorize outbursts. Reprise: American anger control and its vagaries The picture thus far presented is not impossibly complicated, but it warrants a recap before we turn more directly to the issue of anger in popular media.

American Anger Control, the Role of Popular Culture 45 First: American culture in the nineteenth century clearly valued anger in the capacity it gave men to strive to compete and to attack injustice. This was targeted anger, not generalized, which had its own complexities in the signals it presented to boys growing up. But it was quite a different culture from that which began to take shape in the 1920s. But the prior culture was not entirely forgotten; it shows up directly, for example, in emotional standards in many athletic sessions, which are really Victorian throwbacks. Second: beginning with new efforts in the workplace, a system- atic attempt to attack anger, and to insist on unwavering control of the emotion, began to take clear shape from the 1920s onward. The new standards spread well beyond the job setting, and they had real impact. The result was not however as systematic as in some of the ‘anger less’ cultures that anthropologists have studied, in part because it played against the nineteenth-century backdrop. One result was a tendency to work hard to conceal angry emotions that, Americans realized, were unacceptable if expressed but which had not been excised. And third: important exceptional pockets persisted, where anger was evaluated differently and expressed more openly. The evangel- ical subculture and certain leadership positions provide the clearest examples. This means that many Americans might be exposed to conflicting signals – told to keep anger down but exposed to a boss or a coach who was quite different. It means that in key aspects of social life, for example politics, standards became visibly ensnarled, with political candidates carefully demonstrating anger control in public interviews while sponsoring ill-tempered attacks on opponents in television ads. Another result was the common confusion in which Americans sincerely believed that anger was out of control, despite the abundant evidence that many people, in many situations, were actually working hard to keep the emotion under wraps. So finally: how did this mixture relate to media representations of anger? Several possibilities deserve comment. First, many Americans might expect media simply to reinforce the most constructive norms, to provide examples of rewarded self-control, examples also in which anger leaders to failure. This could include representations of some of the exceptional situations – angry bosses or coaches – in which however virtue triumphed through some punishment of angry excess, thus evening out a more complex reality. Or: Americans

46 Peter N. Stearns might seek in media alternative expressions of anger in which they can vicariously indulge. Spectatorship might relieve some of the pressures felt in real life, making the new norms endurable precisely because symbolic alternatives were available. This kind of cultural relief has precedents in earlier situations – for example, aspects of chivalric culture – in which older standards were still represented in play, which helped the process of replacing them with new levels of emotional discipline in real life. Or third: Americans might expect media to present some of the same complexities that real life offered, with anger differentially presented, as clearly continued to happen in fact, without much commentary. Three possible options or combinations thus include: first, media as transmitters of the new standards, with appropriate illustrations of the pitfalls of noncompli- ance; second, media as a source of symbolic alternatives, making the standards easier to live with by providing harmless fictional options; or third, the media simpler as conveyers of a complex emotional reality, warts and all. Media pathways The most obvious point to make about American media culture, at least from the 1930s onward, is its resolute emphasis on cheerfulness and harmony. From children’s fare, to the use of cheerful children in films and television, to the classic American television product, the situation comedy, a great deal of attention has gone into presenta- tions that avoid reference to anger in any form. At most, as in the classic Sesame Street, one figure might be designated as a ‘grouch’, but the character is not deeply angry – as in other light fare, he turns out to be rather lovable after all. Anger, in mainstream American media, is implicitly seen as too difficult to deal with; far better to emphasize the positive, if sometimes superficial, alternatives, reinforcing the anger control standards without dealing with them directly. But there are other popular cultural options, with more complex implications: Sports and, possibly, some segments of popular music suggest a role for popular culture in serving as an anger release point. Many spectator sports have clearly acted as emotional surro- gates – though not only in the United States. The opportunity to watch players and coaches express anger at each other and (perhaps even more usefully) at officials could provide real catharsis. Again,

American Anger Control, the Role of Popular Culture 47 the phenomenon was not just American, but it is possible to argue that the popularity of particularly aggressive sports in the United States (football compared to soccer) owed much to their service in representing and possibly relieving anger. Baseball provided throw- back anger rituals, with manager or player and referee locked in chest-to-chest expressions of rage – tremendously entertaining perhaps because it differed so much from the emotional opportun- ities possible in real life. Trash talk and other emotional expressions among spectators themselves added emotional release (and here the United States differed less from counterpart audiences in other coun- tries). As one fan put it: I could whoop and holler my guts out and nobody would think I was nuts ... I mean, it really helps you, brother, to reach down to your toes and pull out a yell you been keepin’ bottled up inside you for Christ knows how long. (Constantine, 1983: 86) Movies and to some extent television offer another common outlet, aside from comedy options. The most prominent dramatic feature, surfacing over many decades though with some intensification in recent years, has involved the pervasive fascination with violence. Interpretation here is challenging. Here as with sports there are some comparative issues: violence is also a feature in Japanese media pres- entations, but emanating from a rather different emotional culture overall. It would be imprudent to rush to judgments about relation- ships. But the violence theme in American popular media has gener- ated comment and concern for decades, from the comic books and dime novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, to the explosion (literally) of special effects extravaganzas of the early twenty-first century. The obvious question was the nature of any relationship to emotional culture. Much of the violence – again, from comic book heroes to Hollywood Rambos to the latest video game – was impressively emotion-free, offering almost a parody of the emotional standards being urged in real life. Aggression was not backed by anger, but by more calculated masculine assertion or, as in the film Falling Down, obvious mental illness combined with explo- sive technology. Did media violence relieve anger frustrations in the relevant audience? Or did it – as childrearing critics worried literally every decade from the 1920s onward – connect directly with acts

48 Peter N. Stearns of mayhem, and if so what if any was the emotional mechanism involved? Did film violence suggest a lack of emotional intermedi- aries between normal control and outright violence? The media fascination was clearly important, but its relationship to anger stand- ards was hard to interpret – more difficult than in the sports arena. On the whole, if the pervasive video violence had an impact beyond entertainment, and vicarious emotional relief, it seemed to appeal to psychosis more than identifiable anger (Freedman, 2002). Two other, more recent trends in American popular culture suggest – for whatever reason – a growing need to represent anger directly. Rap music, and some other popular musical forms, often express anger quite directly. Lyrics vary, of course, but the genre often articulates anger against a variety of targets. The artists may well be seeking to carve out yet another exception, in which common standards do not apply to them. For audiences, the effect may be more another form of release, of an alternative to normal constraints, rather than direct emotional inspiration. For an even wider audience, the rise of reality television brings anger more regularly and directly into American homes than any other format thus far introduced. From the 1990s Real World to current episodes of Survivor, participants often seem deliberately chosen for their incompatibilities, for the opportunities they present for regular confrontations. While the format usually avoids outright violence, interpersonal outbursts clearly have fueled the popularity of the genre – despite initially critical reviews. The tone may now be spilling over into mainstream Hollywood productions, as in the recent August, Osage County – a major movie about family anger with no redeeming restraints or reconciliations involved. As with the actual history of anger since the 1920s – with a dominant effort at control but many gaps and exceptions – American popular culture, overall, offers a pervasive interest in sidestepping anger in favor of good cheer, but also a number of alternative repre- sentations. These may help Americans come to terms with a more complex reality, or they may provide fictional outlets that actually help make constraints in real life more endurable. Certainly, the recent intensification in the presentations of anger, particularly with more graphic special effects violence and the rise of reality televi- sion, helps explain why so many Americans think that anger is a key national problem. As with crime – where Americans also frequently

American Anger Control, the Role of Popular Culture 49 mistake image for reality – there are plenty of opportunities to see alternatives to the wider effort at anger control. And judging by audience popularity, a large number of Americans clearly enjoy the chance to watch fictional or playing field anger unfold. Media treatments of anger that seek a bit of a middle ground – between the poles of sitcom cheerfulness or the crescendos of Apocalypse Now or reality TV – are obviously infrequent, but they do exist, and provide a final window into the complexities of the emotions/media relationship where anger is concerned. Twelve Angry Men, for example, clearly showed how various types of anger clouded careful, rational analysis in a murder trial; but persuasive effort, initially by one juror, ultimately overcame the emotional barriers. Upside of Anger treated anger somewhat more humorously, and alcoholically, until it finally becomes clear that the emotion was unnecessary. Anger Management offers one of the most direct takes on the emotion, suggesting as well a surprisingly direct connection with the analysis of anger standards in contemporary American history. This was not a major film, though the later (2012) conversion into a TV series suggests more than usual public resonance. The theme played off one of the more interesting products of the larger anger control effort: ‘anger management’ therapy programs vividly drove home the growing public intolerance for anger, but also the incom- plete success in socializing the emotion; therapy might be necessary, indeed might be mandated by concerned courts of law or employers, to bridge the gap. The movie’s plot rests on emotional reversals: a man is unjustly required to undergo anger training, from a ther- apist who sometimes seems to be exploding with anger. It’s not an unfamiliar comedy device, but it may also tap the real uncertain- ties over anger in contemporary American culture: the standards of emotional control are clear, but they keep getting violated from unexpected quarters. The result is confusion all around. The film indeed moves in several directions. Therapy is teased, for intruding arbitrarily in the life of an individual. Anger certainly abounds – another effort to tap the American tendency to exag- gerate the emotion’s prevalence? The therapist has a bevy of angry patients, all of them weird and in some cases seemingly psychotic; is this a statement of how Americans should view anger as bizarre, or an effort to display the emotion as essentially trivial? At points, the

50 Peter N. Stearns movie is surely an invitation to sit back and enjoy manifestations of anger that have little to do with normal life. The link with violence is palpable: even Buddhist monks get angry and immediately start a fight; nonviolent and therefore less objectionable anger is not seriously evoked. More briefly the movie evokes a boss who uses anger to intimidate his more constrained employees, but this facet – as we have seen, a real issue in some American work settings – is not seriously explored. In the end, the protagonist turns out to have been angry at himself, and once he realizes this gains firmer control over his emotions generally, winning his girlfriend in the process in the best happy ending tradition. And therapy is vindicated, with a final billboard proclaiming the virtues of anger management for anyone who has a problem. The movie thus suggests a variety of takes on anger, without coming too seriously to grips with any one of them; and this superficiality may be the most important contact with the complexities of the emotion’s place in American culture. Conclusions I make no claims here of a definitive assessment of the relationship between anger and popular media. More analysis would surely be useful. But it is clear that American emotional standards, as they have developed over the past several decades, make any straightforward or consistent representation of anger difficult. Film and television often ignore anger in favor of pervasive cheerfulness. But another approach seeks to present acts of anger/violence presumably as an escapist device in a culture that actually leans heavily against angry display. Occasionally an older theme, anger as a righteous response to injustice, can emerge – in depictions of the nation’s slave past, for example – but this is uncommon. A film like Anger Management suggests some fascination with the emotion, but also real difficulty in taking it too seriously. The real-life effort to urge Americans to keep anger under wraps, and some of the tensions or lost opportun- ities this may involve, prove elusive in most mainstream fare. Notes 1. Sutermeister, R. A. (1943). ‘Training foremen in human relations’, Personnel, 20, p. 13.

American Anger Control, the Role of Popular Culture 51 2. Xerox Corporation (1992). Basic Quality Training. Stamford: Xerox Corporation. 3. Sommers, S. (1984). ‘Adults Evaluating their Emotions: A Cross-Cultural Perspective’, in C. Z. Malatesta & C. E. Izard (Eds.), Emotion in Adult Development. Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE Publications. 4. Conversations with student athletes at George Mason University, Fall semester, 2009.

4 Beyond Emotional Intelligence: Anger, Emotional Stupidity, and Lifestyle Issues Ursula Oberst The study of emotions is one of the broadest fields in academic and popular Psychology. Since ancient times, emotions have played a relevant role in Medicine in the interpretation of both health and sickness. The medical recommendations for a proper emotional life, as a means of preserving health, took into account both positive and negative aspects of all emotions, including anger. In Psychology, emotions historically have been studied as inde- pendent from cognition, motivation, and so on, but researchers have become more and more aware of how much these basic processes of human psychological functioning are intertwined. ‘Temperament’, such as the classical anger-prone ‘choleric’ temperament, described as far back as Hippocrates, or the more recent notion of ‘Personality’, is sometimes cited as an underlying construct in order to explain how these processes work together. Cognitive psychology holds that emotions depend on the cognitions and appraisals we have in response to stimuli. If we think the glass is half empty, we feel bad, and if we think it is half full, we feel good, and changing this thinking would change our emotions. In accordance with recent studies on emotions I do not fully agree with this interpretation, and as an underlying construct for both emotion and cognition I will introduce the expression ‘lifestyle’ instead of personality. In this chapter, I want to challenge the common belief that our conscious 52

Beyond Emotional Intelligence 53 selves, our cognitions and emotional knowledge, are always the masters of our emotions; emotion regulation, and specifically anger management, though it is a skill that can be learned and successfully employed, does not necessarily guarantee that people will employ adequate anger management in real-life situations or that they will become better people. Further, I will discuss some contradictory and paradoxical attitudes of contemporary society towards the expres- sion of anger. Emotions and emotion regulation I want to begin with a statement from one of the most important researchers into the Psychology of emotion regulation, James Gross. Sometimes, our emotions lead us to do the oddest things. Grown men pull over so they can brawl over which driver is the bigger idiot. Parents lose their cool and bark hateful things at their chil- dren that they later regret. Adolescents who were best friends before a jealous spat vow never to speak again. And children throw tantrums as if on cue at the supermarket candy display. (Gross, Richards, & John, 2006) In view of scenes like these, one might think that emotions, especially so-called negative emotions – normally fear, anger, and sadness – are of little use, or at least are an obstacle to reasoning and a hindrance to healthy human relationships. In fact, certain philosophical and sociological movements have encouraged or discouraged the experi- ence of emotions. For example, the Stoic philosophers considered emotions and passions as bad states of mind that had to be brought under control by learning self-control and fortitude as a means of overcoming destructive emotions such as anger. The Stoics taught that destructive emotions resulted from errors in judgment, and that a sage, or person of moral and intellectual perfection, would not suffer such emotions (Fraile, 1976). A wise man is not supposed to have, or at least is expected to control, his impulses, states of mind, fears, desires, because they are too individual, too ego-centered, and too unreliable to foster rational thought. A contemporary counter- part of the stoic sage is the character Spock on the TV series Star Trek (NBC, 1966–9), a man from the planet Vulcan whose inhabitants

54 Ursula Oberst have no emotions, and so their behavior is guided by pure reason and logical thinking. Unlike the Stoics of antiquity, creators in the romantic period in literature, philosophy, and the arts in the eighteenth century in Europe were part of a movement in search of emotions: apparent ‘irrational’ states of mind, like emotions, empathy, intuition, and so on, are now acknowledged to be a privileged path to an under- standing of things that rational thought alone cannot grasp. The idea of the importance of emotions for healthy psychological func- tioning is also shared by the hippie movement in the 1960s and 1970s and what came to be known as ‘Humanistic Psychology’ and ‘Positive Psychology.’ The emotional, ‘romantic’ character in the Star Trek original series is ‘Bones’, the ship physician Dr. McCoy, whose emotional and compassionate ‘humanity’ represent the emotional counterpart to Spock’s pure reason, but sometimes his compassion is an obstacle to the optimal outcome in life-threatening situations. However, in the Star Trek movies produced in the twenty-first century (2009, 2013), the Spock character does have emotions, though he is usually able to manage them successfully; by this concession, the creators of Star Trek seem to credit the results of a series of scientific studies which show that an individual without emotions, or with poor emotions, is unable to make adaptive choices in his or her life. Thus, far from being wise, an emotionless individual would be an idiot. We also know that certain deficits in emotion recognition or emotion processing result in psychopathological disorders. For instance, people with autistic spectrum disorder are known for their lack of empathy, for example the ability to ‘feel’ the emotions of others. The seminal studies by Antonio Damasio (1995) and Joseph LeDoux (1998) suggest that emotions and cognitions are far more integrated than originally believed. Emotions are complex multifactor phenomena and they involve several features: the perception of an external or internal emotion- ally competent stimulus, such as the sight of a potential aggressor, or the thought of one, and so on; the cognitive appraisal of this stimulus – good, bad, dangerous, sexually attractive, and so on – a subsequent set of physiological changes basically in the autonomous nervous system, and manifest expressions in face and body as well as behavior, but which also can be suppressed; a motivational component

Beyond Emotional Intelligence 55 expressed as a tendency or an intent to act in a specific way; and a subjective experiential state or feeling, which is the hedonic aspect of the emotion, such as pleasant or unpleasant. Researchers distin- guish between basic emotions and social emotions, although there is no consensus about which and how many emotions are considered basic. Normally, fear, anger, sadness, and joy are considered basic emotions, because of their universal features across individuals and cultures, whereas emotions like shame, contempt, guilt, pity, and so on are social emotions. By now, we know that emotions can be helpful, providing crucial information about the state of one’s interactions with the world or speeding one’s responses in life-threatening situations. So, sadness makes the individual focus on a past loss, analyze the reasons for it, change plans and ways of interpreting life, by making people either withdraw from the environment or seek isolation or by making them seek comfort in others, thus helping people to forge bonds with other human beings. Joy generally, enhances creativity and creative thinking, though not necessarily critical thinking. It fosters opti- mism and self-esteem, and moves the individual to the social sharing of his feelings. Fear focuses the individual’s attention on potentially harmful, dangerous and threatening stimuli and prompts the indi- vidual to act to escape; by contrast, anger focuses on an obstacle and how to overcome it. The organism is getting ready for confron- tation and fighting. As Rasmussen (2010) aptly notes, were it not for painful feelings – for instance, fear, anger, shame, and so on – we would not know that we were in need of something, and we would not be compelled to make changes to our immediate or long-term circumstances. As stated above, emotions are important in decision-making. According to the so-called ‘somatic marker hypothesis’ (Damasio, 1995), people, when faced with complex and troublesome choices, may be unable to decide using only cognitive processes. In these cases, somatic markers – a ‘gut feeling’ – can help to decide by directing the individual’s attention towards more advantageous options, hence simplifying the decision-making process. Somatic markers are associations between reinforcing stimuli that induce an associated physiological affective state – ‘gut feeling’ – and bias our cognitive processing in a certain direction. For instance, when I had to decide whether to accept or not the invitation to write a paper for this

56 Ursula Oberst congress, I was torn between considering the amount of time I would have to invest in writing the paper and the positive ‘gut feeling’ I had when remembering the rewarding experience of former congresses, with their possibility to meet interesting people and to share ideas with colleagues. So, nowadays, no researcher would deny the adap- tive value of emotions, even of so-called negative emotions. They are called ‘negative’, not because they are bad for the individual, but because of their usually unpleasant hedonic value. Emotion regulation and emotional intelligence As Salovey and Mayer (1990) stated, emotional intelligence could be considered an oxymoron, because emotions convey the idea of unreasonableness. But the concept of emotional intelligence helped to consolidate the idea that people can use their emotional processes in order to promote rational thinking and adaptive psychological functioning. Emotional intelligence (EI) is an approach in psychology that emerged in the 1990s and has ever since generated enormous interest both in the public at large and in academic circles, at least in Spain. The concept of EI has stimulated a great deal of more or less serious publications since the expression was coined by Salovey & Mayer (1990) and popularized by Goleman (1995). The propo- nents of EI claim that there is a positive relationship between EI and psychological health and psychological adjustment, as well as success in life. Some popular science publications like those written by Goleman give the impression that EI is the panacea of happi- ness. As Goleman (1995) stated, EI would confer ‘an advantage in any domain in life, whether in romance and intimate relationships or picking up the unspoken rules that govern success in organiza- tional politics’ (p. 36). In his early publications, Goleman assures his readers that EI contributes to success in just about any domain of human life, much more so than intelligence. From a scientific stand- point, Goleman’s optimistic claims are untenable, and his model was criticized for containing ‘nearly everything but IQ’, for confusing skills with moral qualities, and for failing to distinguish between cognitive-emotional skills and residual factors such as personality traits, motivations, attitudes, and human virtues, many of which go far beyond the act of dealing with emotions, such as zeal, persistence,

Beyond Emotional Intelligence 57 and self-control, self-motivation, impulse control, delay of gratifi- cation, self-regulation of affective states, stress-avoidance, and so on. Therefore, Goleman’s initial model and the later models estab- lished by him and by other authors based on his theory are called ‘mixed models’. To give another example of a mixed model, the one developed by Bar-On (1997) also includes broad concepts such as interpersonal intelligence, consisting of emotional self-awareness, assertiveness, and self-regard, self-actualization and independence; intrapersonal intelligence, including empathy, interpersonal rela- tionships, social responsibility; and adaptation, involving problem solving, reality testing, and flexibility; and finally, stress manage- ment, comprising stress tolerance and impulse control, and mood, for instance, happiness and optimism. In contrast to these mixed models, Salovey and Mayer’s so-called ‘ability model’ is more parsimonious and exclusively centered on emotional processes. It contains four cognitive-emotional skills: perception, appreciation and expression of emotions; emotional facilitation of thought; understanding, analysis and use of emotional knowledge; and reflexive regulation of emotions (Mayer Salovey & Caruso, 2000). Or, to be more concise, perceiving emotions, under- standing emotions, and managing emotions. Returning to the Star Trek (1966–9) series, the emotionally intelligent character would be Captain Kirk, a man with strong emotions and feelings, but also with a brilliant mind, and whose boldness, intuition, and ‘gut feelings’ in critical situations usually save the lives of the ship’s crew at the end of the episode. It has yet to be definitely proven whether the concept of EI is an interesting new construct in psychology, able to predict important aspects of personal development or achievement, or just a fad that falsely promises another infallible road to happiness (Chamarro & Oberst, 2004). The founders of EI themselves have been highly crit- ical of what they consider misconceptions and unrealistic expec- tations and of the Zeitgeist of EI (Mayer Salovey & Caruso, 2000), especially the idea that EI is more important than IQ and that having EI allows people to consider themselves ‘intelligent’, even when they are lacking in traditional intelligence. While the traditional cogni- tive IQ is elitist, the concept of EI is egalitarian. Everybody should be able to learn how to be more emotionally intelligent, while this is hardly true for IQ. The idea of a ‘softer’ intelligence is attractive

58 Ursula Oberst to many people. As Mayer, Salovey, and Caruso (2000) noted, for the skeptical, the cultural spirit of EI ‘ ... suggested a dumbed-down picture of the future in which reason and critical thinking no longer mattered’ (p. 97). Another pitfall of EI is that people can be easily trained in it and can learn it in a couple of weekend courses in the belief that enhan- cing their EI will turn them into happy and successful individuals and enable them to resolve all their interpersonal conflicts; but if after the training courses they do not turn out to be high achievers, if they are not happy, optimistic and surrounded by friends, then they risk not only to be considered as (emotionally) stupid, but it is also their own fault. Interestingly, we can observe a return of the ‘emotionally dull’ or ‘nerds’ in entertainment. In the TV series The Big Bang Theory (CBS, 2007) the otherwise hyper-intelligent physicist Sheldon has marked traits of ‘emotional stupidity’ and can be inter- preted as a person with Asperger’s syndrome. The eccentricity of the brilliant Sherlock Holmes, played by the no less brilliant Benedict Cumberbatch in the TV series (BBC, 2010), also displays clear features of this type of autistic spectrum disorder. These traits of both charac- ters are probably meant to add fun and interest to the series, but they can also be interpreted as a call for the right to be imperfect. Finally, it has been said that people with high EI are also more prosocial, and ultimately, better people. Claims in the popular press and in past research have highlighted the prosocial effects of know- ledge of emotion-regulation, but studies by Coté et al. (2011) have shown that this knowledge has a dark side as well, and that in and of itself it is neither positive nor negative; it can forward the objectives of individuals whose interests are self-centered and egoist or of those who would do harm to others just as easily as the purposes of people interested in benefiting the greater good. In the authors’ words, both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde can have high emotional intelligence. These criticisms notwithstanding, we have to acknowledge that in some countries like in Spain, and in some contexts, such as business, leadership, the workplace and education, the concept of EI is highly popular and people spend a huge amount of money to attend courses or implement school-based interventions to promote EI in children. In any case, the impact of Salovey and Mayers’ work in research and Goleman’s books on all branches of society can be interpreted as an indicator of how important emotions and emotion management

Beyond Emotional Intelligence 59 have become in contemporary society (Roberts, Zeidner, & Matthews, 2001). The trouble with anger One of the greatest challenges of emotion regulation research and emotion regulation practice is the regulation or ‘management’ of anger. As stated above, anger is one of the basic emotions, along with fear, sadness, and joy. Everybody can experience anger and lose their temper, but there are considerable individual differences in anger proneness and general hostility. Whereas anger is an emotion, in ‘Personality Psychology’ hostility is referred to as the tendency to experience anger and related states such as frustration and bitterness. As a personality trait, this hostility or anger proneness is known as the ‘lethal component’ of the so-called type-A personality, charac- terized by competitiveness, time urgency and hostility, because the physiological correlates of hostility and anger lead to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease. Thus, frequent anger is bad for your health, another reason to undertake emotion regulation measures. The primary goal of anger is to protect or enhance survival (Rasmussen, 2010), and expressing anger can also lead to renegoti- ation. It can also be used for revenge and retaliation, because it may help to restore a damaged sense of self-esteem. But it does not lead necessarily to aggression. If the tenets of EI are true, people who have undergone EI training or emotion management therapy should have more emotional know- ledge and emotional abilities to regulate their anger. What I want to show in the following section is that people, even if they have a high degree of emotional knowledge, can still be ‘unable’ to regulate nega- tive emotions. I use the word ‘unable’ in quotation marks, because, as I will explain in this section, they certainly are capable of regu- lating their anger, but do not want to do so. In the movie Anger Management (2003), the behavior of a nice, calm and mild-tempered passenger on a flight is misinterpreted as anger and aggressiveness. Dave Buznick (Adam Sandler) suddenly finds himself accused of air rage and is sentenced to undergo anger management therapy. But his therapist, Dr. Buddy Rydell (Jack Nicholson) seems to have many more anger issues than his patient. It is not clear if Dave is an unflappable person, or if he is just overtly

60 Ursula Oberst calm but has a deeply buried inner rage, as his therapist tries to make him see by constantly putting him into embarrassing situations in order to force him to get in touch with his emotions. At the end of the movie, it turns out that everything was a setup by Dave’s girl- friend to improve, with the help of the therapist, Dave’s damaged self-esteem. The movie Anger Management Setting aside the dramatic hyperbole of the movie, we can observe a series of contradictions as the plot of the movie unfolds. First, Dave is obviously, by personality, a cool-headed person, but the tension of his environment puts him under suspicion, and his calmness makes other people who are perhaps not as easy-going, angry at him. In psychodynamic terminology we would say that people project their own anger onto him. Projection is an unconscious psychological defense mechanism by which we perceive feelings and wishes in other people that actually are in ourselves, but deigned as socially unacceptable. Thus, when I am angry but think this is not appro- priate in a certain context, I may want to perceive anger in other people. Second, the therapist’s and fellow patients’ continuous insinuations about Dave’s apparently deeply-buried anger and their provocations during the anger management sessions finally do make him angry, in a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Dave is diagnosed with ‘toxic anger syndrome’ TAS, but as we can see, Dave’s problem is not the disorder but the treatment. I want to quote a popular and scathing remark by the Austrian journalist and poet Karl Kraus (1874–1936) about Freudian psychoanalysis that states: ‘Psychoanalysis is the mental illness of which it purports to be the cure’1 (translation by the author) (Kraus, as cited in Fieguth, 1978: 227). This paradoxical issue notwithstanding, I wish to make clear at this point, that anger management is a renowned psychological treat- ment wherein people attend sessions, frequently by court order, not simply to manage their anger, but also to control their violent and abusive behavior, which is not the same. As a psychological treat- ment it can be highly effective to prevent further violence and aggres- sion. As a third contradiction in the movie, we observe that overt angry outbursts by other people are not only tolerated as something

Beyond Emotional Intelligence 61 natural, but that angry people seem to be more respected than those who maintain their serenity like Dave. When Dave finally displays a rage fit against his boss treating him unfairly, the boss gives in. So from this scene we infer a hypocritical standpoint of society towards anger, the emotion of anger is proscribed, but we adjust to a manifest display of anger or rage. In summary, the movie Anger Management reflects the common view in contemporary society that anger is an emotion that is not politically correct and therefore has to be ‘managed’ like a company, or treated like a disease. On the other hand, hostility and aggres- siveness are tolerated. The idea conveyed by the movie that anger can be a mental disorder and needs treatment, reflects a tendency in contemporary society to attach a diagnostic label and then treat and medicate all kinds of unwanted or uncomfortable behavior and conditions. For instance, frequent temper tantrums of spoiled chil- dren are now considered a disorder, named ‘disruptive mood dysreg- ulation disorder (DMDD)’ in the recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). The defining charac- teristic of this highly controversial disorder in children is chronic, severe and persistent irritability, often displayed by the child as a temper tantrum, or temper outburst. This medical view of unwanted behavior conveys the idea that people – children in this case – are helpless victims of their own emotional outbursts. But in many cases we can view their behavior as extremely useful and goal-driven. Why should kids stop having fits of rage, when it is so effective in getting them what they want from their parents? There is a common belief that anger can be justified, ‘righteous’, ‘good anger’, or unjustified, ‘bad anger’. The problem is that ‘for me’, when ‘I’ am angry, it is always ‘justified’, and my anger is always directed at the right person, with the right intensity, at the right time, and for the right reason! The distinction between justified, ‘healthy’, and unjustified anger is philosophically interesting, but psychologic- ally not useful. We may claim that a husband’s anger about his wife serving him an over-salt soup is unjustified, but our anger about millions of people in the world having no soup at all is justified. But what if the wife put excessive salt into the soup on purpose, in order to defy her husband? Or maybe she is retaliating at her husband for something he said or did before? According to our personal beliefs all our own anger episodes are justified! The distinction between

62 Ursula Oberst the kinds of anger that are justified and those that are not is drawn by social consensus: In a society with a prevalent male chauvinistic attitude, men’s anger about salty soup might be considered justified. The anger in the Western world about the ISIS fighters exterminating entire villages is not justified in the eyes of Islamic fundamentalists. It is extremely difficult to establish a moral criterion to tell one kind of anger from another. Generally, we would consider social protests against the life-threatening change of living conditions imposed by other people, and against which the affected individual is powerless, as righteous anger. When the common good rather than personal interests are at stake, we are more likely to consider the resulting anger to be justified. Anger is therefore a tricky feeling. It seems easier to tell apart justified sadness, for instance after the loss of a beloved one, from unjustified sadness, for instance in depression, or justified fear, in danger, from unjustified fear, like phobia. But in the case of anger it is extremely difficult to tell apart, because, unlike with sadness or fear where I am usually not the cause or the target of the other person’s emotion, with anger we are frequently faced with a situation where we can be both and, where our own emotional reactions to the display of anger by another person may bias our understanding of what is going on. Therefore, it is intelligent to manage anger in many situations in order for people to get along with others and to maintain their careers, friendships, and intimate relationships. Emotion regulation refers to attempts the individual makes to influence the emotions he or she has, when to have them, and how they are experienced and expressed. People differ greatly in their ability to change a given emotional state. When emotions are very intense, for instance panic at the dentist’s, or inadequate with respect to a given situation, like hilarity at a funeral, they can be maladaptive and disruptive of human relationships and ultimately lead to psychological problems. Once the emotional response arises, it can be shaped and modu- lated in different ways by the individual. We can select or modify the situation that we know to elicit certain emotional reactions, for example by avoiding going to the dentist. We can modify our cogni- tive appraisal of the situation or stimulus – the dentist is a specialist who will give me relief from my toothache. Or we can modify our expressions and behaviors. For instance, I can try to contain myself

Beyond Emotional Intelligence 63 and breathe while sitting in the dentist’s chair. People use a huge variety of emotion regulation strategies, which have been described and their adaptive value discussed in many scientific studies (for a summary, see Company, Oberst & Sánchez, 2012). Our efforts to regu- late emotions can be automatic or controlled, conscious or uncon- scious. Most people, like you and me, usually know what we should do, which strategy would be best in order to manage our anger in the face of interpersonal situations. So why do we keep getting angry at our partner’s not putting the cap back on the tube of toothpaste? I wish to discuss two possible explanations. First, the common belief that venting one’s anger is a means to reduce it. And second, that we feel what we actually want to feel and therefore sometimes make little effort to change the emotion. Anger is a compelling emotion (Rasmussen, 2010), which is felt when we experience threats or obstacles to our desired state that we believe should be removed. It is a ‘protest and fighting emotion’ that emerges when we perceive threats and obstacles to outcomes we feel entitled to receive or possess. The purpose of anger is to remove obstacles to outcomes one feels entitled to receiving. Not simply something I want, but something I think I am entitled to have, such as a soup with the right amount of salt, a properly closed toothpaste tube, or a world where peace reigns. Anger is also used for revenge and retaliation, to re-establish a sense of self-esteem that has been damaged – on purpose or only perceived – and to hurt another person, to make others pay for taking something away from us or not giving to us what we believe we deserve. A common belief is that when you are angry you should vent your anger, like a pressure cooker uses a valve to let off steam. Many people tend to vent their anger on their children or partner rather than at the workplace. There they might use more suppres- sion, acceptance and reappraisal strategies. The idea that indi- viduals can regulate their anger in a kind of cathartic release by expressing emotions or viewing a dramatic performance has been around since the time of Aristotle. In Aristotle’s definition, tragedy is an imitation of an action with incidents arousing pity and fear, culminating in a cleansing of those passions, the catharsis. Catharsis means purging, and the idea is that the tragedy arouses emotions in order to purge away their excess, and to reduce these passions to a healthy and balanced proportion. The act of expressing, or more

64 Ursula Oberst accurately, experiencing the deep emotions is often associated with events in the individual’s past which had originally been repressed or ignored, and had never been adequately addressed or experienced. In the hydraulic metaphors often used by psychoanalysis, venting is a means of cathartic release, and people still believe that one can achieve this kind of relief from negative emotions via their uncon- trolled expression. In anger management sessions, the experts some- times recommend a more controlled form of venting and blowing off steam for the clients to manage their anger, for instance, by hitting a pillow. However, studies have shown that venting, rather than redu- cing anger, might actually increase it (see Parlamis, 2012). Venting also produces negative consequences, retaliation, lower self-esteem, a negative impression on others, less favorable appraisals of the other party and fewer negotiation concessions. Only when expressed by higher-power counterparts was venting seen to lead to greater concessions from lower-power targets. However, the author cautions that we must distinguish between expressing anger through venting as an emotion regulation strategy and ‘anger display’, which is not actually meant to be regulated but is actually an expression of power with the goal of achieving submission. Thus, emotions and emotion regulation are always part of an inter- personal process. I may have knowledge of how to manage my anger, but we have to take into account who the other person is. Am I angry at my husband for not washing up the dishes? Am I angry at my boss who criticizes my work? Or am I telling a friend how mad I was at my husband or at the boss? The same anger will be felt and expressed in a different way depending on the target and on the reactions of the other person. Will the target accept my anger passively, will he apolo- gize, will she retaliate? But my reactions do not only depend on who the target is or on the specific situations, but also on my inner core beliefs about myself and about how life should be. This shows that we are not the passive victims of our emotions (passions). Emotions generally do not lead directly to behavior. They may push and guide us, but we are not compelled to act in a specific way. Thus, emotions are not just passively experienced, and they should be conceived as actions, rather than passions (e.g., Solomon, 2006). With respect to my argument that we sometimes make no effort to reduce negative emotions because we actually want to feel the emotion, even when it is unpleasant, studies by Tamir (2009)

Beyond Emotional Intelligence 65 challenge the common belief that people always want to feel pleasant emotions rather than unpleasant. Evidence shows that people want to feel unpleasant emotions, such as anger or fear, when these emotions promote the attainment of their long-term goals. As I pointed out earlier, all emotions are necessary because they predis- pose people to act in a goal-conducive way. For instance, fear can promote successful avoidance of harmful stimuli. Thus, when people are motivated to avoid threats, such as meeting a potential assailant while walking home at night, they may want to feel fear and regu- late their feelings accordingly. For example they may amplify their fear. Fear compels us to behave in a way that assures safety. People might not like to feel fear because it does not produce pleasure, but arriving at home safe and sound certainly does. Thus, people may want to feel certain emotions whether they like them or not. And feeling bad may actually be good. What people want to feel is not necessarily based on rational choice, for instance, this wanting may be conscious, or it may operate outside of consciousness. As anger promotes the pursuit of confrontational goals, people should want to be angry in certain situations. Indeed, in a study by Tamir, angry participants performed better than others in a confron- tational game by killing more virtual enemies, but performed as well as others in a non-confrontational game (Tamir, Mitchell, & Gross, 2008, in Tamir, 2009). The author concludes that when people pursue instrumental goals, for instance, goals that secure delayed rather than immediate reinforcement, they are willing to forgo immediate pleasure in order to maximize utility. Dysfunctional emotion regu- lation can result from wanting the ‘wrong’ emotions. People may work to reduce their anger issues in anger management sessions and become quite efficient in doing so in certain situations, for instance at the workplace, but in interactions with their intimate partner may ‘want’ to feel anger. This is the case because core values and beliefs may be at stake when interacting with an intimate partner, but not with a colleague, for instance. Which emotions we want to feel in which situation constitutes tacit knowledge acquired in early child- hood through learning. Contemporary academic psychologists have difficulties dealing with unconscious processes, though they cannot deny their exist- ence. This is due to the well-known fact that unconscious proc- esses can neither be observed nor measured, and the individual, by

66 Ursula Oberst definition, cannot give information about them. So for many decades, the unconscious, initially so cherished by the psychoanalysts and psychiatrists of the early twentieth century, led a life in the shadows of research and practice. In the twenty-first century, researchers like Tamir or Rasmussen have undertaken a new approach to it, though many prefer to talk about ‘tacit’ or ‘latent’ rather than ‘unconscious’ processes. Lifestyle: backlash of the unconscious The aforementioned models of emotional intelligence and emotion regulation are cognitive, for example, based on the assumption of the primacy of cognition over emotion. There is a stimulus, it is cognitively appraised by the individual – good or bad, like–dislike, threatening–harmless, and so on – and then, according to the belief about the nature of the stimulus, an emotion is eventually generated accordingly. If I consider my mother-in-law to be a nasty, malevolent person who will criticize me after the family meeting, I will certainly experience anger at the sight of her. By using cognitive or behavioral techniques, for example cognitive reappraisal or relaxation, the indi- vidual can learn to manage his/her emotions. I can convince myself that my mother-in-law is simply an unhappy woman who gets some comfort in criticizing others, but is essentially harmless to me. Or I can drink a glass of wine during dinner, relax and smile at her. Accordingly, in anger management sessions or in cognitive-behavior therapy, the individual is taught to revise his or her distorted cogni- tions in order to recover from unhealthy anger or depression. In popular psychology, as expressed in self-help books, people are told that by accepting the thought that the glass is ‘half full’ instead of the former ‘half empty’ their happiness, or at least their improvement, depends on their own will to think the right thoughts. And if they do not feel better, are not happier or do not get rid of their angry and hostile feelings, they are not only doomed to feel bad and unhappy, but are also looked down upon for being non-cooperative, oppos- itional, stupid, and stubborn. But as hard as we may try, if we ‘want’ to see the glass as half empty, we will never be able to see it as half full, and this is an unconscious process that is difficult to influence. Alfred Adler, a former colleague of Sigmund Freud and the founder of ‘Individual Psychology’, was the first to claim that all our behavior

Beyond Emotional Intelligence 67 is goal-directed. We are not the passive victims of our experiences or of the present situation, but the active authors of our destiny. Thus, whatever emotions we feel in any given situation are neither a mere result of stimuli, nor of our cognitive (rational) appraisal of the stimuli, but also of the goals we are pursuing in life. Adler stated, that in childhood ... a goal is set for the need and drive of psychical development, a goal toward which all its currents flow. Such a goal not only deter- mines the direction which promises security, power, and perfec- tions, but also awakens the corresponding feelings and emotions through that which it promises. (Adler, cited in Ansbacher & Ansbacher, 1956, p. 100) The goal we pursue in specific situations also depends on the goals inherent in our personality as shaped in early childhood and on what we have learned to consider important. Adler referred to this as lifestyle. In Sociology, the term lifestyle is used to describe the typical way of life of an individual, group, or culture. In a more psychological understanding, lifestyle is a broader concept than personality, and also contains our conscious and unconscious attitude towards life and our conscious and unconscious goals in life. In Adlerian psych- ology, the term lifestyle refers to a person’s basic orientation towards life and his or her unique way of thinking, feeling and acting. When people don’t do what a situation calls for, they are often oper- ating on the basis of their private logic as determined by their life- style. The individual’s private logic may differ widely from the logic of the human community, also called ‘common sense’ (Dinkmeyer & Sperry, 2000). Most of our actions are the consequences of thinking and feeling processes that we don’t recognize and often prefer not to know about but that nevertheless have definite influence on our actions. When the basic assumptions of our lifestyle are fulfilled, we feel good. If not, we don’t. For instance, a typical goal of a woman with a ‘getting’ type lifestyle would be to seek opportunities to get rather than to give. In situations where she cannot ‘get’ for instance, people’s attention, she would feel unsatisfied and react with feel- ings of being neglected and probably sadness. These negative feel- ings have to be compensated for via a further effort to get people’s

68 Ursula Oberst attention. A man with a ‘ruling’ type lifestyle would have the goal of being ‘superior’ to other people and interpret the world in terms of being on top or on bottom. He would be sensitive to signs of domin- ation or submission in other people. He may interpret a difference of opinion as a sign of rebellion against his authority that has to be beaten down so that his superiority can be re-established – and his anger turned into satisfaction. In general, Adler considered all maladaptive goals and a maladaptive lifestyle as a means to fend off feelings of inferiority. Whereas in the cognitive model emotions are a consequence of the appraisal of a stimulus, the Adlerian model of emotions goes some- what further. The appraisal of the stimulus depends on the goals set by our lifestyle. Depending on our purposes and goals we will be more or less likely to consider a difference of opinion as a sign of disrespect or as a sign of interest in working out ideas. If my lifestyle prescribes that ‘I need to be perfect’, the snappy comments of my mother-in-law may be much more damaging to my self-esteem than if my lifestyle goal were ‘I need to be comfortable’. In the first case, I would get angry at her, but in the second case, my emotional reac- tions would be quite different. Unfortunately, these goals are mostly unconscious. They are kept unconscious because they are not always compatible with positive self-perception. If an individual’s goal is let’s say ‘People have to be at my service, because I am entitled to this’, this goal has to be kept hidden from the individual’s conscious self, because as an adult he or she knows that this kind of goal is not socially acceptable. But as this attitude may have worked in childhood with pampering parents, it became part of the individual’s ‘lifestyle’, and he will have the tendency to react with anger when people do not grant his whims and wishes. Anger is the way the individual tries to get what he feels entitled to. Thus, individuals tend to hide their ‘politically incor- rect’ goals not only from the others, but also from themselves. They operate at the threshold of consciousness. Because of the partially unconscious nature of our purposes, the line between intentional and unintentional becomes blurred (Rasmussen, 2010). But the author also reminds us, if we feel an emotion for a purpose, this does not mean that we feel it on purpose. What does all this mean? This means that the husband with the salty soup has a double problem, if he is angry at his wife for not

Beyond Emotional Intelligence 69 serving him the right soup, he ‘wants’ to be angry and he wants her to know he is. And second, if his ‘lifestyle’ is a ‘ruling’ type, he will probably interpret his wife’s behavior as an act of defiance to his superiority and he will have to compensate for his arising feelings of inferiority by putting her down. Anger is the compelling emotion that drives him to re-establish his challenged self-esteem. But as he has learned in anger management that it is not good to shout at one’s wife, he tries to ‘manage’ his anger. In a calm and friendly way he will try – try! – to tell her that he needs less salt in the soup. But even though he may have spent many hours in EI training or anger management training and may have acquired a great deal of emotional knowledge, if he still feels that – once more! – she has disregarded his right to be served, and if his lifestyle leads him to interpret this as an expression of a disdainful attitude, although he might perhaps try to suppress the expression of anger and not shout at her, maybe a captious and bitter remark will slip out. We may think this is better than shouting or hitting, but psychological violence can also be harmful. Even when people try to hide, control or modify their emotion of anger, it is difficult not to let the other person involved see it, because this is our unconscious purpose. I need and I want to be angry, and I want the other person know that I am, but I don’t want to be accused of being angry. I want to be angry, but I don’t want to be guilty of anger. Normally, we can make sure that the other person perceives our anger, even if we suppress it. To make matters worse, because there is no overt demonstration of anger, I can deny that I am angry. However, the other person does feel my anger, but because it was not overt, she is not allowed to name it. And so we risk engaging in toxic or perverting communication. This could be the message of the movie Anger Management (2003), double standards with respect to the emotion of anger. Anger is politically incorrect, and people are hypersensitive to the manifestation of anger, thereby projecting their own anger issues onto others, because they don’t want to be accused of anger. Stearns and Stearns (1985) identified a broad shift in emotionology, for example attitudes or standards that a society maintains towards basic emotions and their appropriate expression. According to these authors, late-Victorian (mostly USA) standards had encouraged males to use anger as a motivating force in a public, but not in a domestic context. But one major feature of

70 Ursula Oberst this emergent emotionology was a significant shift to an emphasis on emotional control and discipline (see Chapter 3 in this collection.) In contemporary American society, anger is considered immature and undesirable. Accordingly, people would have the impulse to conceal their angry feelings, feel guilty for having them, or even more, be confused about their actual feelings because of their emotional inex- perience with this category. Paradoxically, and despite the political incorrectness of anger, we observe the glorification of aggression in certain films, together with an aesthetic presentation of violence – sometimes without the emotional correlates of anger and rage, as in the case of the ‘unemo- tional hero’. This tendency could lead to a potentially dangerous development in the individual and in society, because the combin- ation of an emotional deficit and predisposition to aggression and violence is a core feature of the psychopathic personality. We should not proscribe anger. The experience of anger and its appropriate expression is the way people get what they want, so they need to feel angry from time to time. Anger is a powerful emotion that helps us to deal with interpersonal issues. As Rasmussen states: ‘We know what we want and we know what we don’t want and we generally know what others want us to do or do not want us to do, and we spend our entire lives managing the associated contingen- cies’ (Rasmussen, 2010: 13–14). After exposing this scenario, I might be accused of a pessimistic attitude towards the emotion of anger and the possibilities of anger regulation. This is not true. I just do not agree with people who argue that anger can be avoided or eliminated through the teaching of simple cognitive-behavioral management strategies. Emotional intelligence training or anger management sessions can be highly useful for enhancing our emotional knowledge, and they can help us to deal more effectively with interpersonal situations. But things like EI training are a form of coaching psychology, for instance, a way of optimizing personal resources in people who usually already function in an adaptive way. But when anger is overused, recurrent and maladaptive for the individual, anger management or emotional intelligence training might not be enough. It could also be counter- productive, because emotional knowledge can also be used against the interests of other people. People with recurrent anger issues have to work on a ‘lifestyle level’, in psychotherapy. If we want to help

Beyond Emotional Intelligence 71 people to deal with their anger, we must not tell them how to reduce their anger, we must deal with their ‘lifestyle’. This is not possible in coaching, because in coaching, it is the client who sets the rules and the goals. Only in psychotherapy can we work on the ‘lifestyle’ of clients, with issues the clients need to hide from themselves. In the mid- and late-twentieth century, it was fashionable to undergo psychoanalysis – see the movies by Woody Allen – wherein people analyzed their deepest urges and darkest wishes (see Chapter 7 in this collection). But in the twenty-first century psychoanalysis seems to have been replaced by counseling, coaching, and emotion manage- ment. While psychoanalysis works with unconscious processes, in coaching only the conscious aspects of the client’s behavior are worked through. In our society, with its demands to be a competent, successful, and self-sufficient individual, who can achieve success and happiness by just trying hard enough, there is no place for the dark sides of the emotional forces. Coaching and self-help books make us believe that we can be eternally young, slim, rich, and happy ever after, if we think the right thoughts and do the right things. The trouble with anger is that it reminds us of our dark side. We do not want to acknowledge this dark side, because behind anger that what causes it, is something much more damaging to the individual, something we usually keep hidden from others and from ourselves: fear. Fear of losing my life, my rights, my claims, my beliefs about how the world should be, about how I should be treated, in short, fear of losing anything I believe I am entitled to. The husband with the salty soup is not angry about salty soup. He is in fear of losing his value. Note 1. ‘Psychoanalyse ist jene Geisteskrankheit, für deren Therapie sie sich haelt.’

5 Empty Husks: Age, Disability, Care, Death, and Amour Sally Chivers In August 2014, Gillian Bennett, an 83-year-old with dementia, deliberately ingested a lethal drug. She posted a ‘right-to-die mani- festo’ on her blog1 ‘deadatnoon’ just prior to her suicide, explaining that she didn’t want to become an ‘empty husk’, ‘a vegetable’, a living ‘carcass’, who would needlessly in her view cost tens of thousands of dollars ‘eating up the country’s money but not having the faintest idea who I am’ (‘Goodbye’, 2014). In stark contrast, David Hilfiker,2 a 69-year-old retired physician, describes the time since his diagnosis with Alzheimer’s disease as ‘one of the happiest periods in my life’ (‘About’, 2014). Calling the prospect of her continued life as an ill Canadian ‘ludi- crous, wasteful and unfair,’ Bennett explains that to her ‘facing death is thoroughly interesting, absorbing, and challenging’ (‘Goodbye’, 2014). She articulates her choice to take her own life as resting on a deep belief that because of dementia she will cease to exist as herself: her ‘carcass’ will be ‘physically alive but there will be no one inside’. She describes the plan to end her life by ‘taking adequate barbitu- rates to do the job before my mind has totally gone’ as ‘ethically’ ‘the right thing to do’ (‘Goodbye’, 2014). She privileges intellectual ways of knowing the self and expresses that in the absence of the capacity to understand, it would be irresponsible to become an increased economic burden on the state. By contrast, when tests reveal that Hilfiker’s condition is not in fact Alzheimer’s, he is thrust into a new phase of questioning about the self: ‘What was I now? What was I going to do?’3 The absence of Alzheimer’s, rather than the original diagnosis, robs him of his sense of self. 72

Empty Husks: Age, Disability, Care, Death, and Amour 73 Blogging the living death Both Bennett and Hilfiker refer to the fear that accompanies diag- noses of dementia, tying it to contemporary care dilemmas, and they both aim to eliminate fear associated with diagnoses of dementia, through quite different means. Bennett’s blog mostly avoids articu- lating her feelings, trying to offer a matter-of-fact explanation of her provocative choice. But she does reveal that while she is not afraid of death, she is afraid of dying alone. Similar to Bennett, Hilfiker4 fears ‘being drugged and incontinent in some nursing home’ and also fears abandonment by all except for his wife once he is in that state (‘Now it Begins’, 2013). He refers also to the embarrassment that accompanies Alzheimer’s disease, fearing ‘the uncontrollable rages that sometimes accompany [the] disease’. He explains, ‘part of my reason for this blog is to address that fear and embarrassment’. He privileges an emotional transformation as a way to counter a deep fear of shame and abandonment, describing himself as more ‘emotionally open’, able to ‘look back on [his life] with satisfac- tion and gratitude’, experiencing ‘extraordinary closeness to some people’ (‘Now it Begins’, 2013). He claims that ‘life over the past year as an Alzheimer’s patient had become very meaningful and fulfilling’ (‘Letting Go’, 2014). And he refers to having become ‘a better and more joyful person’, through writing about it (‘The Last Post’, 2014).5 The contrast between Bennett and Hilfiker’s perspectives reveals cultural views of value and of identity. Bennett’s matches a dominant view, promoting the idea that individual value comes from coherence, rationality, and the ability to, if not work, at least not deprive others of their time and money. A worthwhile self, from this view, travels a clear life trajectory – through birth, career, death – and is relatively self contained. Hilfiker offers an alternative view, one rarely given attention in popular discussions of aging, that demonstrates the value that can come from refusing the very perspective that Bennett espouses. To Hilfiker, becoming a person with dementia frees him to make previously intolerable mistakes and relish them as a valu- able part of interdependent human existence. Though perhaps it is ironic that his own diagnosis turns out to be a mistake, while Hilfiker believes he has Alzheimer’s, he is able to revel in a new emotion- ally motivated self. He revels in the vulnerability that has allowed

74 Sally Chivers him to forge new interpersonal connections and to become more joyful. And that enjoyment remains once he decides to close his blog and accept that the symptoms he exhibited are not, in fact, signs of dementia. He signs off with an acknowledgment of his gratitude. Cultural panic News stories about aging tend to at least reference the failing economy and news stories about the economy almost always reference the aging population, especially related health-care costs. Citizens who can no longer work already strain the notion of productive individualism upon which capitalism rests. Citizens who not only cannot work but also require other people’s labor (aka care) in order to perform the activities of daily living pose a threat not only to their own indi- vidual worth but also to societal worth, which will be sapped by their very ongoing existence. Put starkly, Long-Term Living Magazine6 reports that by 2040 benefits for seniors will cost 26.1 percent of the GDP in Spain and 23.5 percent of the GDP in France. A recent report by the International Monetary Fund asserts that increased longevity specifically poses a financial risk for governments, defined-pension providers and individuals, threatening ‘private and public sector balance sheets, making them more vulnerable to other shocks and potentially offsetting financial stability’ (Oppers et al., 2012: 1). They also clearly highlight ‘likely increases in health and long-term care costs, which will further increase the burden of aging’ (Oppers et al., 2012: 8). In doing so they pinpoint the double bind faced by older adults with conditions that require ongoing care, such as Bennett and Hilfiker: these people were already living too long at great expense to the state and the self. The disability intensifies their apparent redundancy. The popular media often creates cultural panic through the horrific trope of the ‘silver tsunami’, depicting an older population, itself overwhelmed by disproportionate dementia, swamping the younger people on shore. The image gains strength because of the belief that the seniors that make up the giant wave not only outnumber younger people, they are also needier, economically and in terms of care. In a typical news spot entitled ‘The “Silver Tsunami” of Alzheimer’s and Dementia’, WPEC-TV7 portrays Scott Greenberg, a seeming expert with unspecified expertise from ComForCare Senior Services

Empty Husks: Age, Disability, Care, Death, and Amour 75 (for whom this is a thinly veiled advertisement) explaining, ‘Nearly 64 percent of family caregivers who don’t get ... outside help for their loved one ... [who is] struggling with Alzheimer’s and dementia will predecease their family member who has Alzheimer’s’ (emphasis added) (‘Health Watch’, 2014). The problem, then, is not just that the proportion of older adults is growing (for instance, that they’re not dying), it’s that they’re becoming ill and in need of care which in turn threatens to kill those of us who are not yet ill, unless we find a way to hire paid caregivers. As Margaret Morganroth Gullette explains it, ‘The frightening side of the media’s relentless longevity discourses about the demographic catastrophe of aging has taught us to anticipate our future duty to care, and to dread it’ (Gullette, 2014). As Andrea Charise (2012) has pointed out in an incisive analysis of an Economist magazine editorial, the silver tsunami discourse is tightly tied to the euthanasia debate. Martin Amis playfully yet pointedly draws on the metaphor of the Silver Tsunami, evoking images of ‘a population of demented very old people, like an inva- sion of terrible immigrants stinking out the restaurants and cafés and shops’ (quoted in Long, 2010).8 His satirical solution is to put a ‘euthanasia booth’ ‘on every corner’. Amis’s argument that ‘There should be a way out for rational people who’ve decided they’re in the negative’ is less concerning than his choice to participate in the widespread incitement of cultural panic (quoted in Long, 2010). The cultural panic that we cannot economically manage an aging popu- lation intensifies cultural fears, like those expressed by Bennett, that the loss of the self as we think we know it leads to a meaningless life. The popular notion of dementia as a ‘living death,’ an existence that is not one, supports choosing physical death in its place. This discourse does not so much support choice for ‘rational people’ as dictate that in the absence of cure, death of disabled older adults is the only responsible option, both for their own good and for that of their carers, not to mention for the economy and the health-care system. The silvering screen Recent films that feature aging prominently, an oeuvre I call the silvering screen, tap into cultural panic about the effect of an aging

76 Sally Chivers population on the economy, typically offering reassuring fantasies of late life (such as Gran Torino, The Bucket List, or The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) or instructive morality plays (such as The Savages, Iris, and Away from Her). When such films take on care as a topic, it is as a problem to be solved, usually through intense marital struggle, within the unit of the heterosexual couple, or, failing that, through relegation to an institution which is either unrealistically idyllic or a place to die quite quickly, freeing caregivers to live their more meaningful lives. In cinema that depicts older adults needing care, the reason is usually a form of dementia, rather than numerous other forms of late life disability that could lead to transformations of family members and friends into carers. The dementia patient becomes a symbol for old age writ large, what I have called elsewhere ‘shorthand’ for ‘the overall horror that is assumed to be a part of the aging process’ (Chivers, 2011: 73). The resulting panic enables the popular discourse to avoid the less sensational but at least equally socially relevant question of what aging might mean for the average, relatively well, relatively old person. The cinema often participates in, but also has the potential to challenge, the limited discursive terrain that induces cultural panic about the costs and threats of an aging population. As Amir Cohen- Shalev puts it, ‘cinema has the potential to partially bridge the schism between aging as subjective experience in contrast to aging as a social phenomenon’ (2009: 2). The understanding of late life disability as both personally threatening and socially significant pervades films about aging. As Pamela Gravagne explains, ‘popular film is “deeply” implicated in the cultural struggle over the way that old age is discur- sively and materially constructed’ (2013: 4). The construction of older adults with disabilities in film, then, reveals and promotes a larger social ethos. Silvering screen films often push viewers to nego- tiate the cultural panic of the silver tsunami, personal fear at the prospect of aging, and social guilt about their own care choices in relation to older characters who become disabled to the extent that they require continual care. Film is a useful venue because viewers can make those negotiations at some remove and in the context of the workings of the imagination. Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012) presents an older retired piano teacher Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) who quite suddenly changes from relative independence to needing more care than her husband

Empty Husks: Age, Disability, Care, Death, and Amour 77 Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) can manage, and it is distinctive in doing so without leaning on the trope of dementia as a symbol of the loss of the competent self. As such, the film doesn’t dwell as much on memory and the need to preserve life stories as it does the current increasing need for care and apparent diminishment of the person who requires it. Anne’s transformation leads her lucidly to express the desire to die. But it is the transformation of her spouse from husband to carer to killer that intrigues critics and offers a provoca- tive means through which to think about potential resistance to how popular discourse situates late-life care choices, and the lack thereof, for people with dementia, people with other late-life disabilities, and people who age more or less without disabilities. Titled as Amour is after an emotion, and without the article (l’ or un) that typically would be expected in French, the focus on a couple’s intricate attempts to adjust to the after-effects of Anne’s stroke brings attention to the many facets of late life love. As Emmanuelle Riva put it in an interview, ‘The title is Amour [Love]. It is nothing else’ (quoted in McNicoll, 2013).9 The test to and endurance of Anne and Georges’ marital bond competes with other aspects of depicting life with symptoms caused by a stroke. Psychoanalyst Danielle Quinodoz describes Amour: ‘Haneke stages emotions which concern each one of us intimately: love, the care for our loved ones, ageing, the horror of losing control over our bodies, and death’ (2014: 375). She oddly makes parallel the emotions of love and horror, the emotional labor of care, the process of aging, and the state of death. I will explore how Amour’s depiction of love mixed with horror invites an under- standing of aging with a disability as provoking death when care fails. The intense focus on the unit of the couple propels a cultural fantasy that care can be downloaded from the state to the family and that, failing that, death is preferable to any form of institutional care. Whether or not the film endorses that death remains ambiguous, offering fodder for much needed debates about the tangible effects of evoking panic about an aging population. Love from within and horror from without In Amour’s shocking opening scene, the fire brigade knocks down the door of what appears to be an abandoned apartment. The lead fireman’s clear olfactory revulsion leads him to open windows in a

78 Sally Chivers Figure 5.1 Screen capture from Amour (2012) directed by Michael Haneke main room before he enters the previously sealed bedroom, where he and the audience find a decaying and emaciated yet peaceful corpse, strewn with flowers on a carefully made bed. That gruesome yet loving image hangs over the remainder of the film. After a brief cut to the title and director credit, there is a bustling scene of a concert hall audience (an obvious self-reference to cinema viewership) prior to a performance, complete with an announced reminder to turn off cellular phones in preparation for the entertainment to follow and applause, presumably as the performers (whom we never see) come on stage. We gradually meet Anne and Georges as they greet with affection one of the star performers back stage before traveling home on the bus to their apartment, which has been robbed by someone who has used a screwdriver to force open the lock. Their fixation on the door hearkens both back in film time and forward in real time to the moment when the fire brigade has and will forcibly break open the same door with much larger tools, causing much more damage than the petty burglar, to discover the horrific carcass. In combin- ation, the forced entries by emergency services and by the burglar set up the film’s main device whereby the couple tries to create a domestic sanctuary and any outsiders who enter become intruders. Anne and Georges’ apartment alternates between being a cozy nest, a poorly defended last outpost, and a chosen prison. Jim

Empty Husks: Age, Disability, Care, Death, and Amour 79 Vanden Bosch calls Amour ‘a film about one couple’s descent into a self-isolating cavern of caregiving’ (2013: 518). Gradually, as the camera moves from focusing on the human forms of the inhabit- ants and reveals more of the setting, the growing dishevelment of the apartment comes into view, so that the desperate situation of the couple becomes more apparent to film viewers who had been enraptured by the melodrama. As Vlad Dima explains, ‘Wide- open spaces hardly figure at all in this film and there is rather an insistence on private interior space’ (2014: 6). The trip to the concert hall turns out to be the exception in a film that takes place solely inside the apartment. The couple’s return from the concert in the opening scene is the last glimpse viewers have outside the apartment building. For the remainder of the film, as Anne and Georges isolate themselves in their domestic space, viewers remain confined to the action or lack thereof in the apartment to which they have been set up as invaders in the opening scenes and that they know is going to contain a decrepit dead body. Soon after Anne has her first stroke, for example, the audience is left to view a series of shots of the dark empty apartment and surmise that the couple has sought outside help, momentarily abandoning their safe haven. The struggle to keep Anne at home requires changes to the apart- ment, including the furnishings and the visitors. The camera uses a long laborious take to emphasize workers bringing in an adjust- able bed, lingering over the detailed process of setting up the frame, unwrapping the plastic from the mattress, and working the controls to ensure the bed is functional so that the couple might be able to manage it themselves. The delivery of the bed symbolizes a broader set of invasions into the domestic world, foreshadowed by the fire brigade and the burglar. Visits, phone calls, and even text messages from their daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert) continually disrupt their privacy. Neighbors come by with food and to vacuum. They always loiter to chat for longer than Georges would like, offering opinions on his wellbeing. The constant interruptions hint that Georges is not suited to care for Anne and that the couple was already using outside help before her strokes. The most persistent intruder to their apartment, Eva, anxiously insists that her father Georges cannot cope. While arguably justified, her pleas grate within the world of the film which is set up to argue

80 Sally Chivers for the peaceful and interdependent existences of the older couple, free from medical interventions and outside judgment. Anne comes to prefer that Eva stay away and particularly that Eva not bring her husband to the apartment because, Anne says, ‘I don’t need any comments on my predicament.’ Eva’s periodic visits escalate in their invasiveness, from interrogating Georges about his plans, to pushing him to put Anne in hospital, to forcing her way into the bedroom that Georges has locked, only to see Anne clearly agitated by her presence. During earlier visits, Georges tolerates Eva’s insistent ques- tions, explaining his new routines and plans to obtain outside care if absolutely necessary. But when she pushes too hard, he berates Eva, explaining, ‘Your worries are no use to me ... I just don’t have the time to deal with your worries.’ While visitors are always intruders to Georges and Anne’s apart- ment, two intrusions poignantly emphasize the ambivalence of her new state of being. The performer from the concert that began the film visits and quite openly interrogates Anne about her stroke, which allows her to tell him straightforwardly, ‘I’m paralyzed on my right side. That is all. This can happen when you get older.’ She demands a private performance and enjoys making her former student play a piece he struggles to remember. Subsequent to his visit, Anne receives a motorized wheelchair in which she careens around the foyer, indi- cating that she is regaining a modicum of independence. Both the former student’s visit and the power chair appear to offer hope that the couple is managing a new existence on their own terms. But the pianist follows up his visit with a condescending note that reads, ‘it was beautiful and sad to see you’ and expressing ‘deepest sympathy’, indicating that Anne’s matter-of-fact dismissal of her symptoms has been unconvincing to the outside view. Later, after she wets herself, Anne tears away from Georges in her motorized chair, but the apart- ment doors are not wide enough for her to navigate on her own and she is ultimately still stuck. The film portrays continual intrusions into a protected space in order to emphasize horror at Anne’s new state of being. The apart- ment is set up as vulnerable from the opening shot and yet each opened door and window, each doorbell, each ring of the phone, and each text message comes across as an enhanced threat to the couple’s ability to maintain their loving interdependence in their own home.

Empty Husks: Age, Disability, Care, Death, and Amour 81 Domestic care waltz In the early days of Anne’s disability, Anne and Georges learn together new ways to negotiate their familiar space and their usual habits. Shortly before Anne has her first stroke, the camera dwells on her preparing a boiled egg for Georges and he demands that she refill the saltshaker, hinting that she typically is responsible for domestic chores. Once Anne returns to the apartment after surgery on her carotid artery that has gone wrong, Georges takes up the tasks that were previously Anne’s. Just as he tries to take on Anne’s domestic work, George also struggles to learn the role of caregiver, including bodywork. Anne coaches him carefully in how to transfer her from wheelchair to armchair in the first of a series of scenes that portray intricate physical maneuvers that resemble a slow dance, a difficult new intimacy full of physical embrace and shuffling coordinated steps (See Figure 5.2 on figshare). He carefully cuts up her food so that she can still feed herself. He moves her body through physical exercises so that her muscles won’t atrophy. He washes her hair over the sink, using a saucepan to pour the water over her shampooed hair. He cleans up and tries to comfort her after she wets the bed. The work Georges does as a caregiver takes its toll on him, affecting his blood sugar and disallowing him from his usual routine of napping. Anne is firm that he should take care of himself, but that becomes increasingly difficult to do as his duties increase. His different recitations of a daily routine build incrementally: from speculating, during Eva’s first visit, that he might hire a home health aide, to having hired two and fired one, to enumerating for Eva his daily rituals to convey their tedium. After Georges’ frustrated outburst, as Eva cries by the living room window, he appears impas- sive. But he leaves the room and returns with a teacup for her, saying, ‘The tea is not very hot anymore but it does make you feel better.’ This gesture indicates the type of care he has learned to give, as well as its limits. Despite evidence that it is available and possible, Georges and Anne resolutely refuse ‘other options’ besides home care. Bosch perceives this to be a great weakness in the film: ‘to assume that we must cope with [‘aging’s threat to our bodies’] alone is where [Haneke’s] vision fails’ (2013: 518). Georges’ early reassurance of Anne to let him take care of the burglary, rather than following her suggestion of outside

82 Sally Chivers help (the concierge or the police), foreshadows the care choices to come. As soon as she returns from her surgery, Anne makes Georges promise never to take her to hospital again. He later makes clear to Eva that a move to hospital would mean an additional move to a ‘care home with nursing.’ He explains that he promised not to send Anne there and claims that he can do what a care home would do. His ridi- cule of Eva escalates to the point where he mocks the idea that Anne could move in with her or that they would ‘pack her off to a care home’. As Bosch puts it, ‘Why Georges does not seek out hospice care to help Anne with pain management at this point, is the huge unanswered question in this film’ (2013: 518). Quinodoz similarly notes that there may have been other options: ‘Furthermore, perturbed by the “home or hospital” dilemma, Georges fails to consider discussing possible solutions with the family doctor, Dr Berthier. It does not cross his mind that help may come from outside’ (2013: 379). Gullette (2014) points out that he doesn’t even seek advice from a friend, let alone turn to typically recommended options such as respite care. As Anne’s care needs escalate, one care worker arrives to do some of the more intense body work but also to show Georges how to do such things as change Anne’s diaper. While before, as George cared for her, we saw Anne’s bare legs, now the film goes further to show her bare breasts while the aide washes her (See Figures 5.3 and 5.4 on figshare). The second hired care worker cruelly tries to force Anne to look at her reflection in a mirror, so Georges fires her, saying, ‘I hope from the bottom of my heart that one day someone treats you the same way you treat your patients, and that you too will have no way of defending yourself.’ Both incidents emphasize that Anne’s dignity can only be preserved if Georges is her sole carer. The care workers are another set of intruders who threaten the couple’s interdepend- ence and emphasize the horror of aging with a disability. Anne resolutely refuses pity, excessive care, and the prospect that her new state of being is acceptable. While Anne is recovering from the first stroke, Georges leaves the apartment to attend a friend’s funeral. In his absence Anne tries to attempt suicide but has only managed to open a window and get from her wheelchair to the floor. So she must turn to Georges for help. She says, ‘There’s no point in going on living. That’s how it is. I know it can only get worse. Why should I inflict this on us, on you and me?’ When he insists, ‘You’re not inflicting anything on me,’ she replies, ‘You don’t have to lie,

Empty Husks: Age, Disability, Care, Death, and Amour 83 Georges.’ He does not believe that she truly doesn’t want to carry on, telling her, ‘You think you’re a burden to me. But what would you do in my place?’ This conversation occurs while she is still relatively capable, requiring Georges’ help to move around the apartment and prepare her meals, but able to read and feed herself. As Georges points out, ‘things are getting better every day.’ A death worth showing When Georges angrily outlines his day-to-day care duties to Eva, he concludes by saying, ‘Nothing of any of that is worth showing’, drawing overt attention to the choices the film makes about what to show and what not to show of the new care regime. Bosch describes the film as a ‘powerful and unblinking view’, indicating the cultural desire to look away from the detailed process of developing care prac- tices and from late life disability but perhaps missing the times when the film does seem to ‘blink’ (2013: 518). Anne’s second stroke appears off screen and viewers are only told about it explicitly after they have already seen Anne with heightened symptoms: Anne has gone from having little movement on one side of her body to also being almost non-verbal as well as easily agitated. Though the film does not show the second stroke, it does show Georges smothering Anne to death, Figure 5.2 Screen capture from Amour (2012) directed by Michael Haneke

84 Sally Chivers for almost a full minute. After telling her a story to indicate that he understands her coded communication, he hesitates as he reaches over as though to retrieve another pillow to make her more comfort- able, places it over her face and then pushes his own face hard down on top of it while her legs flail repeatedly and she moans. He repeti- tively grunts and repositions himself to put enough force to keep the pillow in place despite her resistance. Bosch describes the scene’s relentlessness: ‘Death by way of pillow suffocation is the means by which the final act of “amour” (if that is what it is) is delivered – a violent act, which the camera does not cut away from until the last leg quiver of Anne is over’ (2013: 518). Georges’ perspective can be difficult to establish since the film revels in long shots of his seemingly impassive face. As Bosch puts it, The overall tone of the film becomes one of feeling-less-ness, espe- cially on the part of Georges. He becomes stoic and self-isolating as a caregiver in the later stages of Anne’s deteriorating condi- tion. Even after the final act of mercy killing, Georges shows no grief, but only a tired numbness as he seals off the doors of the apartment with tape to prevent the smell of decay from escaping. (Emphasis added, 2013: 519) But viewers can glean his interiority through three fantasy scenes. Georges’ fantasies work within the film’s logic to justify his choice to smother Anne rather than continue to fail at caring for her or turn to outside help, while at the same time the film’s turn to fantasy makes more significant the choice to depict Anne’s death in graphic slow detail. Immediately after the first scene that shows the nurse doing bodywork, when Anne’s body has been brazenly displayed as mere flesh to be handled, Georges imagines her back playing the piano. After Anne falls out of bed, frustrating Georges by trying to do more than she can manage, he dreams that a doorbell ringing entices him into the hallway of their building, which is flooded and in a terrible state of disrepair. As he tries to understand the scene, a hand (possibly his own) reaches from behind him and tries to smother him (See Figure 5.6 on figshare). After he has smothered Anne, he fantasizes that she is alive in the kitchen, doing the dishes and that they leave the apartment together, with her reminding him to take his coat. The progression of fantasies demonstrates Georges’ desire to be free

Empty Husks: Age, Disability, Care, Death, and Amour 85 from the rigors brought on by Anne’s disabled frame, which becomes tied to the apartment that had been their sanctuary. By killing her, he frees them to leave the apartment space even though the film cannot follow them out into the world. As Gullette puts it, ‘Haneke may be giving voice to the fear on the part of a self-abnegating care- giver that he will – or must – go mad finally in order to eliminate his charge and end his own ordeal’ (2014). Ambivalent and even conflicting readings of the death scene are possible: as an act of mercy, as fulfilling Anne’s request, as violent murder, as a commentary on how Georges and Anne appear to have no options besides the one they cannot abide: institutional care (Bosch, 2013: 518–19). However, the film not only shows Georges choosing to kill Anne, it does so graphically, conveying it as a violent (if justified within the discourse of the film) act rather than a simple peaceful solution. The violence with which Georges carries out the act belies the concept of dignity that usually accompanies arguments for assisted suicide or euthanasia. Anne’s legs kick for a long time. Georges appears to smother himself as he smothers her. As Dima puts it, ‘He buries his own face into the pillow, creating a macabre mirror image with his wife: one is on the side of death, the other on the side of life, but they are both dying, they are both deprived of oxygen’ (2014: 8). The interpretation of the violence is key to interpreting the film’s commentary on late life care, aging, and death. Georges is perhaps following through on Anne’s earlier request, but he is also acting on the deep anger and frustration foreshadowed in an earlier scene when he slaps Anne. However, this is not a simple escalation of violence. The provocation for that attack was not simply the diffi- culties of trying to feed his wife yet again, but also his frustration at her refusal to accept food from him, which itself is likely an attempt on her part to choose to die on her own terms or to communicate to him that she still wants to die. Overwhelmingly, the scene appears to convey desperation caused not so much by Anne’s symptoms but by a refusal to consider options besides Georges’ solitary care for Anne or even a sense that there simply are no other viable options. Conclusion Having implicated the cinema viewership in the early scene of the concert hall audience, Amour draws on such self-reflexivity to

86 Sally Chivers comment on the role of film and the imagination. When Anne first tells Georges that she wants to die, he implores her to imagine switching places, but she demurs, saying, ‘But imagination and reality have little in common.’ Her utter refusal of empathy conveys that she is beyond an emotion that the film is requiring both Georges and viewers to adopt. And through her distinction of imagination from reality, she pinpoints the different ways this film has been read: as an artful rumination on late life and care or as a poor example of choices made by an older couple after a stroke. The first time we see Georges cut Anne’s food up for her, he tells her a story about having gone to the cinema as a small boy and then recounted the film to an older boy after the fact. He tells her that he was so moved not only by the film, but by recounting it, that he wept: I don’t remember the film either. But I remember the feelings ... I was ashamed to cry. But telling him the story made all my feelings and tears come back, maybe even stronger than when I was actu- ally watching the film. This signals that Amour ought to be remembered in terms of the emotions it evokes: of pathos for the struggling couple, horror at the prospect of aging with a disability, dread at losing self control, sympathy for the relentless work imposed on family caregivers, shame at resorting to institutional care, and, arguably, relief at having a partner who cares enough to stopping performing care work and kill. The cultural discourse about aging evokes its panic by turning to extreme test cases to display the convergence of disability with age, such as elder abuse scandals, right-to-die cases, and, occasionally, innovative approaches to dementia care that, while dramatic, compel- ling, and promising each in their turn, do not get at the quotidian experience of contemporary aging. Amour is intriguing because it plays into the cultural fears of aging as accompanied by disability and dependency pushing to the test case of apparent euthanasia, but it does so without turning to the ubiquitous bogeyman of dementia. It attempts to establish the everyday drudgery of care and the endur- ance of marital love without delving into the nostalgic reminiscences or flashbacks that dominate cinema about older adults, especially those with dementia.

Empty Husks: Age, Disability, Care, Death, and Amour 87 That said, the film contains many of the tropes that pervade dementia narratives. Like Hilfiker and Bennett, Anne appears to be afraid of particular types of care and of losing control. To emphasize that fear, the film heavily relies on the unit of the couple, as do both Bennett and Hilfiker’s blogs, which frequently refer to their spouses. Quinodoz claims, [Haneke] conveys in a realistic mode the concrete difficulties the couple must now face in their everyday lives, allowing us to perceive the deepest expression of their love through intimate gestures which might appear distasteful to those who cannot see beyond physical decay. (2014: 375) The film is about the ‘amour’ between Georges and Anne transformed by horror at decay. That is its strength and its extreme shortcoming, choosing as it does to frame Anne’s transformation as straightfor- ward decline towards a life not worth living. Unlike Bennett and Hilfiker, Anne maintains a clear sense of self. She does not have the freedom from a past self that Hilfiker relishes. Instead, she appears, despite her cognitive wellness, to see herself as an ‘empty husk’, with no continued need to survive. But Anne’s flailing legs suggest another perspective is possible and necessary in the conversation. How viewers interpret them in relation to their own views on late life and on the right-to-die determines whether the film is a liber- ating or destructive depiction. The ambivalence offers the potential to raise the stakes for a set of debates about what there is to fear about growing old and about the aging population. Calling euthanasia itself a ‘caregiving fantasy’, Gullette claims, ‘Amour provides both the punishment of the fantasy, and the fantasy’ (2014). The debate the film provokes about care in relation to cultural panic is perhaps the most important contribution of this film.10 Notes 1. Bennett, G. (2014). ‘Goodbye & Good Luck!’, 18 August, deadatnoon.com. 2. Hilfiker, D. (2014). ‘About My Cognitive Impairment’, DavidHilfiker.com. 3. Hilfiker, D. (2013). ‘Letting Go of Alzheimer’s (1)’, Watching the Lights Go Out: A Memoir of an Uncertain Mind, 30 October. Available at: http://davi- dhilfiker.blogspot.ca. Accessed 16 October 2014.