All The Rage by Josh Cohen: Are you polite? You’re probably also very angry

 All The Rage by Josh Cohen (Granta £16.99, 256pp)

One day, Josh Cohen’s wife pressed a book into his hand with the ominous command: ‘You need to read this.’ It was an Elena Ferrante novel, in which the main themes were female and maternal rage. ‘Did my wife want me finally, after 22 years raising three boys, to hear her screaming with rage at them, at the world, but mostly at me?’ he muses.

For the past decade, it seems anger has been the defining colour and tone of our daily lives. 

And Josh Cohen’s new book All The Rage cleverly taps into this feeling that, all around us, people are on the brink of losing their rag.

A psychoanalyst and author, Cohen still recalls the white-hot anger he felt at the age of five when his brother drank his can of lemonade and then laughed at him.

Rather than ignoring anger, though, he feels we need to understand it better so we can handle it. We often confuse anger and aggression – but they are different things: aggression is an action while anger is a feeling. And unlike aggression, anger can be concealed from the world, and even from oneself. 

A frequent discovery patients make in psychoanalysis is how much anger they’ve been harbouring, both past and present, without being aware. Cohen separates the chapters into the different types of anger we can feel – righteous rage, failed rage, cynical rage and useable rage.

This takes us on a wide-ranging journey that encompasses Greek myths, Shakespeare, Freud, Trollope – and even the Incredible Hulk, of whom Cohen is a huge fan. (Fascinating fact: the first word of The Iliad is ‘menin’, which means wrath or fury).

Cohen details how anger feels more or less the same, regardless of the cause in which it’s enlisted. As he puts it, the burning injustice felt by the #MeToo activist is also felt equally by the trolling incel.

And he’s also fascinating on how anger can manifest itself in ways other than shouting and screaming. This can range from exaggerated politeness – often humorously depicted as a cliche of the British passive aggressive approach (think of the kind of labels you find on food in office fridges). 

But this can also be more grimly manifested as depression, self-harm or even suicide, if such feelings are turned only inward.

The main target of Cohen’s own wrath is politicians – he thinks they have exploited popular anger and mass rage for their own benefit. Both Trump and Putin get a pasting in this chapter.

Personally, however, the most fascinating parts of the book are the case studies Cohen uses from his own consulting room. 

I’d have loved to read much more about his clients: Victor is absolutely certain that he’s always right and believes that no one liking his aggressive stance is a price worth paying; Olive has debilitating migraines because of her inability to express anger; and Stella is furious not only with her ‘useless’ husband Max but also Cohen himself when he fails to foresee Max leaving her. 

All of the case studies leave you with a dawning sense of recognition of people you may know – or indeed your own weaknesses.

What to do with all this knowledge, then? There are no easy answers here. Cohen, above all, wants us to acknowledge that anger exists, that it can be exploited by those who want power, and that both expressing it wildly or repressing it have their dangers – and, also, that you should be very wary if your other half forces a book on you.