The Crucial Link Between Anxiety, Anger, and Creativity

This is Part 4 of a series on anxiety. See Part 3 here.

Another example of what we as psychotherapists need to convey to our patients seeking relief from their anxiety pertains to the still poorly understood but psychologically crucial connections between anxiety, anger, and creativity.

The Central Role of Psychotherapy in the Treatment of Anxiety

An estimated 470 million people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, suffer from diagnosed anxiety disorders and many of them receive outpatient treatment such as individual psychotherapy and/or psychopharmacological intervention. Almost 15% of American adults are currently taking some psychiatric medication such as anxiolytics or antidepressants for anxiety (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). Though antidepressants, unlike benzodiazepines for instance, are not physiologically addictive per se, they can become psychologically addictive—especially when employed as the primary or sole treatment method for anxiety, i.e., instead of psychotherapy.

The purpose of psychotherapy is to educate and help the anxious patient become more aware of the neurobiological, psychological, and existential significance and sources of their anxiety symptoms, and provide tools, techniques, skills, or methods for constructively managing their anxiety. Such tools may include the appropriate use of psychiatric medications to mitigate the severity of their symptoms. But mostly what psychotherapy needs to provide patients are new ways of conceptualizing, coping with, relating to, and managing their anxiety, including methods like meditation, and addressing the connection between anxiety, anger, and creativity. Without such practical assistance, patients come to depend solely upon their psychiatric medications to manage their anxiety symptoms, a treatment approach which, in the long term, typically proves insufficient.

What is this nexus between anxiety, anger, and creativity? It is, I submit, what psychologist Rollo May (1969) called the daimonic, which can be briefly defined for our purposes here as the most intense, passionate, and potentially dangerous and destructive emotions that people are capable of feeling and of being temporarily possessed or taken over by at times.

May (1981) writes, "Our culture requires that we repress most of our anger, and, therefore, we are repressing most of our creativity." Much the same may be said of our anxiety. Like anxiety, the passionate emotions of anger, resentment, and rage are pervasive in our culture today. There are myriad reasons for this in our day, but, paradoxically, the primary cause in my view is the chronic repression or denial of the daimonic.

Anger and anxiety are both essential elements of the daimonic. When we chronically deny or suppress daimonic emotions such as anger and anxiety, these feelings intensify, turning pathological, and consequently tend to be experienced and expressed destructively or negatively. In the case of repressed anger, it can fester over time, turning into resentment, embitterment, hostility, hatred, aggression, and violence. (See Diamond, 1996.)

Similarly, chronically suppressed anxiety can intensify and convert into painful and debilitating symptoms such as obsessive-compulsive or panic disorder, phobias, or even the paranoid delusions of psychosis. The chronic repression of anger engenders the experience of anxiety in part because we profoundly fear these "negative" feelings and resist taking personal responsibility for them. Instead, we defensively and unconsciously project or externalize our anger and anxiety outside of ourselves, leading us to feel even more fearful and anxious of others and the world.

The experience of anxiety symptoms can, in our day, frequently be linked to this chronic denial of the daimonic, sometimes signaling the presence of repressed anger roiling just below the surface. In this sense, anxiety, like a fever, can, in general, serve as an indicator of some underlying feeling, emotion, or unconscious inner conflict we need to become more conscious of. Thus, anxiety symptoms can be an indication of repressed anger; and feelings of anger, resentment, or rage can sometimes conceal the presence of underlying anxiety, since, for some, it is easier to accept, feel, and express anger than anxiety, while, for others, the opposite is true.

The Inner Need to be Creative

Creativity is a fundamental, existential, or archetypal human capacity and essential to maintaining mental health. Anxiety, anger, and other daimonic emotions like loneliness, loss, grief, and love are what typically inspire and motivate creativity. Creativity of all kinds can provide comparatively healthy outlets for the constructive expression of both anxiety and anger. Indeed, creativity can be broadly defined as the constructive expression or utilization of the daimonic. (See Diamond, 1996.) For obvious reasons, we tend to fear such powerful, primal passions and, therefore, suppress, deny, and avoid them at all costs whenever possible. This is particularly true of intense affects like anger and anxiety, both of which can, in time, turn into pathological rage or panic attacks and other debilitating and potentially dangerous psychiatric symptoms.

We all—whether artists or not—fundamentally need to creatively express ourselves in the world. Creativity can, and does, occur naturally, universally, perennially, in all people in every walk of life. When such creative self-expression is chronically suppressed, we can become more anxious, irritable, or angry. When a dairy cow is not milked daily, it becomes sick. It is much the same with human beings as regards creativity. We need to create in some way every day. When our creativity is frustrated or blocked, we suffer from symptoms, a condition psychotherapist Otto Rank (1936) referred to as the artiste manque, the artist unable to create.

Chronically unexpressed creativity and the problem of anger, violence, and evil in our culture are closely connected. As Jungian analyst Liliane Frey-Rohn (1967) writes, " ... although creativity is usually evaluated as exclusively positive, the fact is that whenever creative expression becomes an inner necessity, evil is also constellated." If this inner necessity or instinctual drive for creative expression is chronically denied or dismissed, we feel frustrated, angry, anxious, and depressed, and become more susceptible and prone to destructiveness and evil. (See Diamond, 1996, 2026.) This is why creativity—or, at least, constructive activity, self-expression, or productivity—is so essential to ameliorating and managing anxiety rather than merely suppressing it pharmacologically or otherwise. For, in doing so, we are simultaneously suppressing our creative urge. Whether it's cleaning the house, mowing the lawn, cooking a meal, writing a book, painting, journaling, or playing music, channeling or redirecting the instinctual life force of anxiety into constructive activity is crucial.

Conclusion

Confronting rather than suppressing our anxiety opens us up to the deeper channels to creativity. Legendary filmmaker Ingmar Bergman suffered from severe anxiety throughout his life, as have many other great artists such as Herman Melville, Vincent van Gogh, and Jackson Pollock (See Diamond, 1996.) Norwegian artist Edvard Munch expressed his own (and our collective) angst in his controversial paintings. And there are countless other examples of such suffering artists today among the hundreds of millions of ordinary people living with painful anxiety disorders. Creativity, in whatever form, be it artistic or ordinary, is key to coping with and constructively expressing anxiety, anger, and other ubiquitous daimonic emotions in our day and, therefore, must be encouraged in psychotherapy patients whenever possible.