These are also the two sources of personality disorders. The personality disordered is molded by recurrent and frequent injustice and he is constantly threatened both by his internal and by his external universes. No wonder that there is a close affinity between the personality disordered and the acutely angry person.

And, as opposed to common opinion, the angry person becomes angry whether he believes that what was done to him was deliberate or not. If we lose a precious manuscript, even unintentionally, we are bound to become angry at ourselves. If his home is devastated by an earthquake - the owner will surely rage, though no conscious, deliberating mind was at work. When we perceive an injustice in the distribution of wealth or love - we become angry because of moral reasoning, whether the injustice was deliberate or not. We retaliate and we punish as a result of our ability to morally reason and to get even. Sometimes even moral reasoning is lacking, as in when we simply wish to alleviate a diffuse anger.

Anger is a primitive, limbic emotion. Its excitatory components and patterns are shared with sexual excitation and with fear. It is cognition that guides our behavior, aimed at avoiding harm and aversion or at minimizing them. Our cognition is in charge of attaining certain kinds of mental gratification. An analysis of future values of the relief-gratification versus repercussions (reward to risk) ratio - can be obtained only through cognitive tools. Anger is provoked by aversive treatment, deliberately or unintentionally inflicted. Such treatment must violate either prevailing conventions regarding social interactions or some otherwise deeply ingrained sense of what is fair and what is just. The judgment of fairness or justice (namely, the appraisal of the extent of compliance with conventions of social exchange) - is also cognitive.

The angry person and the personality disordered both suffer from a cognitive deficit. They are unable to conceptualize, to design effective strategies and to execute them. They dedicate all their attention to the immediate and ignore the future consequences of their actions. In other words, their attention and information processing faculties are distorted, skewed in favor of the here and now, biased on both the intake and the output. Time is "relativistically dilated" - the present feels more protracted, "longer" than any future. Immediate facts and actions are judged more relevant and weighted more heavily than any remote aversive conditions. Anger impairs cognition.

The angry person is a worried person. The personality disordered is also excessively preoccupied with himself. Worry and anger are the cornerstones of the edifice of anxiety. This is where it all converges: people become angry because they are excessively concerned with bad things which might happen to them. Anger is a result of anxiety (or, when the anger is not acute, of fear).

The striking similarity between anger and personality disorders is the deterioration of the faculty of empathy. Angry people cannot empathise. Actually, "counter-empathy" develops in a state of acute anger. All mitigating circumstances related to the source of the anger - are taken as meaning to devalue and belittle the suffering of the angry person. His anger thus increases the more mitigating circumstances are brought to his attention. Judgment is altered by anger. Later provocative acts are judged to be more serious - just by "virtue" of their chronological position. All this is very typical of the personality disordered. An impairment of the empathic sensitivities is a prime symptom in many of them (in the Narcissistic, Antisocial, Schizoid and Schizotypal Personality Disordered, to mention but four).

Moreover, the aforementioned impairment of judgment (=impairment of the proper functioning of the mechanism of risk assessment) appears in both acute anger and in many personality disorders. The illusion of omnipotence (power) and invulnerability, the partiality of judgment - are typical of both states. Acute anger (rage attacks in personality disorders) is always incommensurate with the magnitude of the source of the emotion and is fuelled by extraneous experiences. An acutely angry person usually reacts to an ACCUMULATION, an amalgamation of aversive experiences, all enhancing each other in vicious feedback loops, many of them not directly related to the cause of the specific anger episode. The angry person may be reacting to stress, agitation, disturbance, drugs, violence or aggression witnessed by him, to social or to national conflict, to elation and even to sexual excitation. The same is true of the personality disordered. His inner world is fraught with unpleasant, ego-dystonic, discomfiting, unsettling, worrisome experiences. His external environment - influenced and molded by his distorted personality - is also transformed into a source of aversive, repulsive, or plainly unpleasant experiences. The personality disordered explodes in rage - because he implodes AND reacts to outside stimuli, simultaneously. Because he is a slave to magical thinking and, therefore, regards himself as omnipotent, omniscient and protected from the consequences of his own acts (immune) - the personality disordered often acts in a self-destructive and self-defeating manner. The similarities are so numerous and so striking that it seems safe to say that the personality disordered is in a constant state of acute anger.

Finally, acutely angry people perceive anger to have been the result of intentional (or circumstantial) provocation with a hostile purpose (by the target of their anger). Their targets, on the other hand, invariably regard them as incoherent people, acting arbitrarily, in an unjustified manner.

Replace the words "acutely angry" with the words "personality disordered" and the sentence would still remain largely valid.

next: Metaphors of the Mind Part I