06/04/2021
Why Are People Mean?
by Don Carveth, Psychoanalyst, Torontohttp://www.yorku.ca/dcarveth/Why%20Are%20People%20Mean.pdf
(Talk given in April 2016 in Philadelphia to a grade 3 class studying bullying)
Why are people mean?
Because they’ve been hurt.
If you hurt a dog it growls and might bite you.
If you hurt a cat it will hiss and may scratch you.
People are the same.
Usually mean people have been hurt a lot—ether physically (as in having been hit) or emotionally (as in
having been rejected, abandoned, insulted, teased, bullied).
But mean people don’t always remember having been hurt. They may not be conscious of their past
wounds. But the hurts or wounds, physical or emotional or both, continue to exist in their unconscious
minds.
The mind is kind of like an iceberg. Just as a great deal of the iceberg is under water, so a large part of
the mind is unconscious, while only the surface part is conscious. Painful memories, feelings and
thoughts are sometimes repressed, pushed out of consciousness into the unconscious. Sometimes the
hurts were suffered in early childhood or even infancy and can’t be remembered, but the resulting
unconscious feelings of resentment and hostility stemming from the past are displaced onto people in
the present.
Sometimes the hurts we incur were someone’s fault. Someone might have a mean and angry father, for
example, and his anger and yelling and unjust punishment makes one frightened and angry. But
sometimes we are hurt by circumstances that are really nobody’s fault—say, when you were a baby and
needed mother but she had to go to the hospital to have a new baby and couldn’t care for you properly,
but you were too little to understand. To you it just seemed Mommy abandoned you, didn’t love you
anymore, and you developed a grudge. Maybe when she came home and tried to love you, you couldn’t
accept it, so now YOU rejected HER, as if to say “You weren’t here when I needed you, so who needs you
now! Go away!”
So now maybe you are left with a feeling, an attitude of mistrust. You may expect people to let you
down. Ironically, your very mistrust and anger may lead people to leave you; it might actually drive them
away. This is what is called a self-fulfilling prophecy or prediction: “Mother let me down; I expect people
to let me down, just as mother did.” My very suspicion and anger may lead people to dislike me. I may
even unconsciously choose people who will let me down, just as I feel mother did and, in this way, I
confirm my beliefs. This sets up what is called an unconscious compulsion to repeat.
So whether the injury was physical (hitting) or emotional (hurt feelings), and whether it was grounded in
reality or in a misunderstanding (e.g., a medical operation, surgery or painful treatment that the child
misunderstands as torture), the resulting pain makes one angry. Frustration and pain lead to anger. But
what are we to do with the anger? Often showing it is too dangerous. For example, Dad asks his boss for
a raise and the boss laughs in his face. This enrages Dad but he doesn’t dare to yell at the boss or punch
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him because he’d get fired or sent to jail. So what does he do with the anger? He stifles or bottles it up.
Then what happens to the bottled up rage? There are three possibilities:
First, it backs up all over him (sort of like a toilet backs up). The anger is turned on himself. He beats
himself up, like he would like to have beaten the boss. He calls himself names. He hates himself. This is
depression, which is really self-hate, which is really anger and hate toward others turned on the self,
leading to self-sabotage, self-defeat, self-harm.
Second, instead of turning anger on the self, some people turn it on others. For example, Dad comes
home and kicks the cat, or yells at the kids, or is mean to his wife. Instead of beating up himself, he
dumps his anger on a scapegoat, an innocent party who is attacked or targeted unfairly.
In ancient times people sacrificed animals. A goat, for example, came to be thought of as containing all
the bad, and its sacrificial killing was thought to magically eliminate the evil. Today we still do this, not
by sacrificing animals but by scapegoating innocent people. Instead of dumping anger on herself and
getting depressed or suicidal, the angry person may become homicidal and attack or bully others
instead. This is the root of racism: our frustration and anger dumped on targeted others, the scapegoats.
Happily there is a third, a positive, creative alternative to both dumping on oneself and others. It is
technically called sublimation which involves taking the anger and redirecting it away from antisocial
towards prosocial outlets. For example, one might find an outlet for one’s anger in playing sports; or
listening to or playing loud, crashing rock & roll music; or one might get revenge on the people who put
one down by becoming a big success. “I’ll show them! No matter how mean they are, how much they
put me down, my teachers give me A’s!”
Some people even learn to respond to meanness by being extra kind. They know what it is like to be
hurt, so they seek to help, maybe by becoming a teacher, or a nurse, or doctor, or social worker, or
therapist. Some very great people, like Jesus, or Gandhi, or Dr. Martin Luther King, learn how to “turn
the other cheek.” They practice non-violence in which we refuse to return evil for evil but try to return
good instead.
Some people learn how to put their frustration, anger and pain into art—say, by writing stories, or
making music, or drawings or paintings, etc. This is their creative outlet.
Finally, some people avoid hurting themselves or others by speaking to a therapist—putting it all into
words to a trusted therapist who is trained to listen and to help.
