Catharsis hypothesis — Berkovic

This chapter will look at the consequences of aggression—behavior aimed at harming someone or something. Aggression is manifested either in the form of a verbal or physical insult and can be real (slapping) or imaginary (shooting a fictitious opponent with a toy gun). It should be understood that even though I am using the concept of «catharsis», I am not trying to apply a «hydraulic» model. All I have in mind is to reduce the urge to aggression, not to discharge a hypothetical amount of nervous energy. Thus, for me and many other (but by no means all) psychotherapist researchers, the concept of catharsis contains the idea that any aggressive action reduces the likelihood of subsequent aggression.

This section explores questions about whether catharsis actually occurs, and if so, under what circumstances.

Catharsis through imaginary aggression

​​​​​​​As you no doubt know, many people, both amateurs and professionals involved in mental health issues, are able to give a fairly general description of the doctrine of catharsis. They believe that a wide variety of actions can replace the real attack on the target and thus «drain» (extinguish) the pent-up internal impulse to aggression. Orthodox psychoanalytic theory, using the hydraulic model of motivation, argues that people can defuse their accumulated impulses to violence in various ways: surgeons by working with a knife during operations, salespeople by persistent attempts to convince a recalcitrant customer to make a purchase, climbers routes not traveled by anyone and so on.

Nevertheless, most supporters of the generalized hypothesis of catharsis are usually confident in the expediency of retaliatory aggressive actions even in the absence of an actual attack. They believe that imaginary aggression will still have its positive effect. For example, Otto Fcnichel, a well-known theorist of psychoanalysis and author of classic works in this field, assured his readers that children can benefit from methods of play therapy based on cathartic processes. Children can release their hidden urges to commit violence by punishing dolls during play, creating the illusion that in this way they are punishing parents or brothers and sisters who have unjustly offended them. Even physicians who have little interest in psychoanalysis are convinced that their patients must «discharge» or «release» their pent-up emotional energy by exercising imaginary aggression. Here is one example of such a situation:

The woman participating in the experiment is asked to pick up a tennis racket and begin to beat it on the bed. At the same time, she is asked to say phrases such as “I hate you!”, “Shit!”, “Son of a bitch!”, “I will kill you!”. Group members watching this woman begin to encourage her aggressive actions, asking her to continue in the same spirit and hit with a racket even harder (from Alexander Lowen, cited in: Berkowitz, 1973 b).

Psychotherapists of this trend are not the only people who are convinced that a beneficial release can be achieved through the real embodiment of imagined aggression. For example, one firm began to make and sell toy guns for adult motorists so that they could simulate shooting at other drivers who interfere with their traffic, and thus relieve their annoyance caused by traffic accidents. In a similar fashion, ostensibly violent games were popularized as a safe psychological means of realizing pent-up aggressive desires. In one of these games, its participants (both children and adults) put on special helmets, armor and other protective ammunition and began to run around a darkened room, shooting at their “opponents” with electronic guns. One of the young participants in this game, according to a newspaper report, described the virtues of such a pastime: «You leave here all your disappointments … This shooting and these alleged murders do not make you a criminal.»

Even psychologists such as John Dollard, Neal Miller and their colleagues at Yale University also believed that it was possible to reduce the urge to aggression through the use of such methods. In a monograph published in 1939 on their hypothesis about the connection between frustration and aggression, they argued that «the manifestation of any act of aggression» weakens the propensity for violent actions that arose as a result of the breakdown of previously planned plans. However, they pointed out that «this weakening is temporary, and the impulse to aggression may arise again if the initial feeling of frustration is strong enough» (Dollard, Doob, Miller, Mowrer & Sears, 1939, p. 50). Thus, according to these psychologists, any type of aggressive behavior, including attacking other people or even committing «bleeding», can have a cathartic effect.

Thus, there should be no doubt that the doctrine of catharsis has been widely accepted by many people. However, for specialists involved in the study of human behavior, this fact in itself is not a serious argument in favor of the validity of this theory. Let us recall, for example, how many people believed that the Earth is flat and that the Sun and other heavenly bodies rotate around it. Scientific research should be aimed at obtaining indisputable evidence, and not at achieving unity of views on any problem. What do the results of empirical research really show us? First of all, I would like to consider in more detail the effect of imaginary aggression on the example of the use of toy weapons, and then turn to the consequences of more serious actions. After that, I can tell you more about the real expression of human feelings.

Does imaginary aggression reduce the propensity to display real aggression?

In this book, I have already considered the consequences of imaginary aggression, and you yourself could see the unambiguous results of studies devoted to the study of this problem. In particular, the experiment by Richard Walters and Murray Brown, described in Chapter 6, showed that imaginary violence can increase the likelihood of real aggression. Recall that in this experiment, boys who were occasionally rewarded for hitting a plastic doll began to behave more aggressively towards their competing peers after a few days (see Figure 6-1). Thus, modeling aggressive behavior did not make them friendlier. Similarly, in an experiment conducted with Yugoslav children by Miomir Zuzul (discussed in detail in chapter 3), boys who often played with children’s weapons then showed more aggressive behavior towards their classmates (see Fig. 3- eight).

Other studies in this direction have yielded largely similar results. For example, in two experiments by Charles Turner and Diane Goldsmith (Charles Turner & Diane Goldsmith) it was possible to establish that boys of preschool age who played with children’s guns subsequently showed more aggressive antisocial behavior than boys who dealt with new or ordinary toys (Turner & Goldsmith, 1976).

In Turner and Goldsmith’s experiments, the boys were not provoked to commit any drastic response, but one should not think that imaginary aggression would have a more positive effect if the children were in a state of increased emotional arousal. This conclusion can be clearly seen in the experiment of Shahbaz Mallik and Boyd McCandless.

In their experience, pairs of third-graders, made up of representatives of both different and same sex, had to build models from a construction set. At the same time, each child who was the object of observation did not know that his partner received a special task from the leaders of the experiment, which consisted of either helping to solve the set construction task or hindering its implementation in a sharp form. Immediately after the end of this stage, the subjects had to complete an additional task within eight minutes. Its appearance had a decisive effect on the results obtained. Some subjects, who were members of both the first and second types of groups, had to show imaginary aggression by firing toy guns, while in the control conditions in both types of groups, both participants in each pair spent time in neutral conversations with the experimenters. At the same time, another group was used to determine how aggressive the subjects would become if they knew that the incorrect actions of the partners were not directed personally at them. Experimenters talked to some of the irritated children and explained to them that the behavior of the partners was due to fatigue and distress.

When the time for completing the additional task expired, the experimenters’ assistants moved to another room, ostensibly to solve similar problems of building models from the constructor. Each of the unsuspecting subjects was given the opportunity to either help or hinder this assistant from performing the assigned work by pressing special buttons on the electronic device. The degree of aggressiveness of their behavior was measured by the number of pressing the «Harm» button when trying to interfere with the partner’s work (the maximum allowable number of pressing this button was 20). As a result of this experiment, it was not possible to establish any differences between the behavior of boys and girls, so I present its main results without reference to the sex of the children participating in it.

Rice. Figure 11-1 clearly shows that irritating the children markedly increased the manifestation of their aggressive tendencies (even if their partners did not intend to interfere with their design activities). The actions of the experimenter, who explained the reasons for the other child’s behavior, significantly reduced the desire (or readiness) of the children to punish their offender. Having changed their opinion about the offender in a favorable direction, the children either completely refused to use retaliatory repressive measures, or significantly reduced the level of manifestation of their aggressiveness. On the other hand, an aggressive style of play did not lead to a decrease in the number of attempts to attack the offender. Thus, excited children did not experience the beneficial effects of catharsis as a result of firing their toy guns.

Rice. 11-1. Number of aggressive responses to external intervention (neutral conversation, situational explanation, or aggressive play) (Data taken from: Mallick & McCandless (1966). Study li. Copyright 1966 by American Psychological Association. Adapted with permission of the authors). 

The evidence obtained is quite convincing. They make it possible to completely reject the notion that children, as well as adults, can get rid of their aggressive urges through the implementation of imaginary aggression. Therefore, drivers will not lessen their tendency to be aggressive if they fire bursts of toy guns at other road users, and boys will not become friendlier to their comrades after they have emptied their children’s guns and pistols into them. Therefore, as I have argued throughout this book (and as evidenced by the research cited), war games may even increase the likelihood of actual aggression in the future, because they instill aggressive ideas in the participants and provide rewards for more aggressive behavior.

We have to agree with a woman who wrote a letter to a newspaper a few years ago to challenge the soundness of advice given by a columnist to a reader who wanted to know how she could deal with her son’s temper tantrums. The journalist recommended that this mother give the child a special «whipping bag» to help him «bring out the accumulated irritation.» The author of the letter to the editor was critical of such advice and spoke about an incident that happened in her own family:

When my little brother was angry about something, he started kicking the furniture with his feet. Our mother said that in this way he «lets off steam.» Now he is 32 years old, and if something annoys him, he still takes out his anger on the furniture. But in addition, he began to beat his wife, his children, his cat and destroy everything that comes his way.

Such a story seems quite plausible (see Chapter 6, «The Development of Violent Tendencies»). When the woman’s brother kicked furniture, his imaginary aggression against other people was reinforced, so that his violent tendencies grew stronger, and he himself was more likely to attack any person who provoked his irritation. In many ways, similar processes can occur whenever people behave aggressively, regardless of the form in which such behavior is expressed. It is time for mental health professionals to stop recommending the exercise of imaginary violence as a means of reducing the tendency to aggression.

Additional Considerations

In this context, two more important points should be mentioned. Firstly, the aggressiveness of people can be influenced by their state of mind: aggressiveness can increase with a bad mood and decrease with a good one. This means that the games that people play can temporarily affect their mood, and through it, their behavior towards other individuals. People who have enjoyed shooting targets with a pistol, or running down a dark corridor and hitting all their opponents with an electronic light gun, can really experience a surge of benevolent feelings for the next few minutes or even hours. However, this state will not be the result of their release from the urge to violence, but the result of their good mood at a given period of time. Their increased level of friendliness will last as long as they are in good spirits.

Secondly, it is obvious that many children, and especially boys, enjoy playing with children’s weapons. For their parents, it can be quite difficult, and sometimes simply impossible, to get their sons to stop realizing imaginary aggression. If boys do not buy toy guns, then they are ready to use sticks or just their own hands to conduct imaginary shooting at a fictional enemy.

They demonstrate such behavior not because of their natural aggressiveness, but, perhaps, because of their desire to assert themselves in the world around them. By this they show, albeit only in a way that seems appropriate to their underdeveloped male consciousness, that they want to establish their own control over the people around them. While trying to shoot at strangers from the world around them, they imagine that they are fighting various hostile forces, and even assert their authority for the future. I believe they exhibit much of the same drive as kids trying to push the button that stops an escalator in a subway. It seems to me that fathers and mothers should be sympathetic to the desire of boys to establish their control over the outside world and allow them to play with children’s weapons if they insist on it. However, this does not mean that parents should encourage their children to participate in aggressive games. Moreover, they must instill in their offspring the idea of ​​the inadmissibility of deliberate harm to the people around them.

Imaginary attacks and ordinary manifestations of discontent do not contribute to the achievement of the goal of aggression

There is no mystery in the answer to the question why imagined aggression rarely weakens the urge to commit real aggression in the future: after all, imagined aggression does no harm to the victim. Let’s imagine that Jane is angry with the man who deceived her. Kicking a Bobo doll or a tennis racket on a bed will not necessarily satisfy her aggressive desires; she will have no reason to believe that such actions will actually harm her abuser. Jane will also not achieve a state of catharsis by talking about the misbehavior of her acquaintance to her friend, unless she has the confidence that by doing so she can actually harm him in some way. Supporting this notion is the fact that when a group of psychologists interviewed several employees who were angered by a dismissal notice they had just received, these people became even more hostile towards the company after they had the opportunity to express their critical attitude towards it. leadership. Since they did not believe that their words could really harm the firm, and because they failed to understand the motives of its management in this situation, they began to inflame themselves more and more (Ebbesen, Duncan & Konecni, 1975). We can only increase our arousal if we reflect on the unfair treatment of us, imagine ways to punish the offenders, or even if we actually tell them openly what we think of them, without doing them any real harm.

Aftereffect of real aggression

Even though imaginary aggression does not reduce aggressive tendencies (except when it puts the aggressor in a good mood), under certain conditions, more real forms of attack on the offender will reduce the desire to harm him in the future. However, the mechanism of this process is quite complex, and before you understand it, you should be familiar with some of its features. See →