| | Fred,
I have a subscription to Blockbuster's mailing service. I put "Cube" in the queue - should be here in a week or so. Thanks.
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Off the top of head, thinking about anger in general, I come up with three kinds. 1.) Healthy anger (rationally targeted or not), 2.) Defensive anger which is converted hurt, shame or fear, 3) Background anger (like an underlying mood that is so common to a person that it becomes a personality trait).
Healthy anger is a natural response to a percieved attack on something we value. It is fast to rise, quick to disappear, leaves very little residue, and is proportional to the perceived threat. Emotions, in a sense, are things that should be consumed/experienced/digested and then gone. They aren't meant to be retained, held in, avoided or only partially experienced.
Emotional responses will be experienced differently by a person depending upon their level of self-esteem. With a high level of self-esteem a person experiences themselves as competent to handle what life throws at them and, on average, this means they are less likely to be consumed with anger, or to have the anger drive them into non-rational behaviors. When you feel more competent in general, you see fewer things as threatening. Very low self-esteem can amplify perceived threats till almost anything feels like it is at the survival level - overwhelming.
Higher self-esteem also means being more comfortable with being more assertive which means that it is easier to express anger - which helps to makes to makes it shorter in duration and that there won't be complications from holding it in, or presenting a false facade. High self-esteem is also a background feeling that one is, in principle, lovable and worthy of good things. And that makes it easier to express anger, fear, hurt or shame rather than to worry that it will drive others away or ruin things.
Very low self-esteem means that the person is probably always living behind a false facade, convinced that the real them is too awful to let others see and anything that threatens to 'out' aspects of the real self generates fear and that makes it hard to express anger.
Healthy anger is more likely to be focused on the actual threat and not as automatically ad hominem in nature - notice that the more ad hominem anger gets the further from reality it strays. Instead of feeling a minor amount of irritation that a person picked up something that belongs to you and started messing with it, in another person it could be an anger that focuses on the person as if they were always a threat and not just this action that is inappropriate, and straying still further, in another person the anger could be at all people of a certain type ("Just like a _______ (fill in a racial epithet) to mess with other people's stuff!!"). Anger that strays from the percieved threat or percieved threats that aren't rational (like racism) is very likely to be a defensive pattern.
Another type of anger is a conversion. It is the subconscious converting a far more uncomfortable emotion into anger. The underlying emotion would be either hurt, fear or shame. Emotions are never rational in a technical sense - they are emotions not reasoning, but it makes sense to talk about which emotions rationally follow from circumstances and which don't. The process of conversion is not rational, and it is always pathological. It will have side-effects and can easily, with time, become a pattern that is automatically invoked and the person will also make a practice of blinding themselves to what they are doing. Teens who suffer a loss that naturally causes some depression (hurt) will usually convert to anger. A small child that it threatened by his parents and made to feel fear day in and day out might choose to convert that fear to anger and to suppress that anger to avoid provoking the parent. Later, the boy might find ways to release the anger - maybe killing a small animal. Shame can be even more powerful than fear as an underlying emotion. It can feel much more efficatious to convert paralyzing shame into an anger. You get the idea.
Another kind of anger is related to suppressed anger - but it is better seen as product of this person's sense of life - as if someone has internalized a sense of the universe as against us. The threat to their values isn't a specific action happening at the moment, but rather that they are not right for the universe, and instead of experiencing that as shame, hurt or fear it becomes a background of anger, of irritation. (Moods and emotions are related yet different.)
There is a general principle that is worth noting: With healthy self-esteem at work, emotions are beneficial and often give a motivational impetus to focusing on reality and often tells us important things about ourselves and our relationship with some aspect of reality. All things remaining equal, the passage of time when we are acting out of higher self-esteem, we are tending to grow, to strengthen and develop. With lower levels of self-esteem, emotions may be triggers to defend against seeing reality, or a defense that drives one away from reality and makes it harder to correct bad information or unhealthy responses. All else remaining equal our acts that flow from lower self-esteem will stunt our growth and weaken us.
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