Ancient Wisdom Beats Psychoanalysis

I recently came across this article discussing a recent study on managing anger. The study examined the concept of "venting" to see if it reduced anger effectively. This concept is very much a part of our popular culture, and it goes back to the psychoanalytic model of the mind proposed by Sigmund Freud over a hundred years ago. Freud was not a good scientist, but he was a pretty amazing popularizer.

It is something of a cliche that psychology (and magick, for that matter) tends to latch onto the latest new technology as a metaphor for how the mind works. The recent fascination with computer-like models bears this out today. Before computers it was telephone switchboards, before that it was electricity, and back in Freud's day, psychoanalysis latched onto a model based on something akin to hydraulic pressure. Freud saw emotions as a kind of energy that could be bottled up ("repression") or transformed into socially viable outlets ("sublimation") rather than expressed directly in socially unacceptable ways.

The idea of venting anger comes right out of this schema. Anger is seen as a building up of pressure, like water boiling in a closed pot. "Blowing off steam" in theory reduces this pressure. But in reality, the scientific basis for this has not been supported by studies. Conditioning theory, for example, suggests the opposite, that acting out in anger feels good in the moment but reinforces acting out. This can lead to more suboptimal behavior, not less. But again, studies that directly support this conditioning model are likewise sparse.

So that is what these researchers sought to test, in order to determine how to actually reduce anger. What they found was interesting because it lines up perfectly with recommendations from ancient spiritual practices and does not exactly fit either of the modern models. The most effective methods for curbing anger were found to involve reducing physical arousal - by means of, for example, meditation. That's advice they could have gotten from the Buddhist sangha up the street, and from many other sources including Hinduism and even contemplative Christianity.

The studies reviewed included a total of 10,189 participants, representing a variety of ages, genders, cultures, and ethnicities. The findings show the key to curbing anger is reducing physiological arousal, the authors say, from anger itself or from the otherwise beneficial physical activity it might inspire.

"To reduce anger, it is better to engage in activities that decrease arousal levels," Bushman said. "Despite what popular wisdom may suggest, even going for a run is not an effective strategy because it increases arousal levels and ends up being counterproductive."

The research was inspired partly by the popularity of 'rage rooms', where people pay to smash objects in hopes of releasing anger, said first author Sophie Kjærvik, a communication scientist at Virginia Commonwealth University. "I wanted to debunk the whole theory of expressing anger as a way of coping with it," explained Kjærvik. "We wanted to show that reducing arousal, and actually the physiological aspect of it, is really important."

The team designed the review based on the Schachter-Singer two-factor theory, which describes anger (and all other emotions) as a two-part phenomenon, each comprising a physiological and a cognitive component. Previous research has often focused on the cognitive angle, according to Kjærvik and Bushman, like examining how cognitive behavioral therapy can help people adjust the mental meanings underpinning their anger.

Research shows that can work, they say, but the review also sheds important light on an alternate pathway for defusing fury. What's more, standard cognitive behavioral therapies are not effective for all brain types. Their study examined both arousal-increasing and arousal-reducing activities, from boxing, cycling, and jogging to deep breathing, meditating, and yoga.

Calming activities reduced anger in the lab and the field, they found, and across other variables like methods of instruction or participant demographics. Effective arousal-reducing activities included slow-flow yoga, mindfulness, progressive muscle relaxation, diaphragmatic breathing, and taking a timeout.

I love this finding because here we have a modern scientific study confirming something that wisdom traditions have known for thousands of years. In Magick Without Tears, Aleister Crowley wrote that "Magick investigates the laws of Nature with the idea of making use of them. It only differs from 'profane' science by always keeping ahead of it." There really is no better example of this than meditation, which skeptics railed against into the 1990s before the physiological and psychological benefits of the practice were scientifically established.

This research also shows one more problem with the psychoanalytic model. There are many of those, as readers of this blog well know because I have written about them many times. A number of those unfortunate ideas have made their way into magick and magick theory, since during the first half of the twentieth century psychoanalysis was considered scientific. Its flaws emerged later, after most of the significant magical figures of the period including Crowley had passed away.

The entire point of scientific illuminism is that both magick and mysticism should be treated as progressive sciences that cultivate a body of knowledge with the intent of perfecting practices that exist and expanding those practices into new areas. Scientific experimentation remains the best way we have discovered to do this quickly and efficiently. But it always is intriguing to see new experimentation confirm answers worked out by spiritual teachers long ago.