Rating: 
Summary: Superb, Intelligent, Informative, Useful Analysis of Anger.
Review: Carol Tavris has written a clear, informative, interesting, and meaningful analysis of anger. She documents the various ways in which anger has been understood versus misunderstood by leading (popular) self-help authors and researchers, and distills from these various treatments helpful guidelines for understanding and managing anger. Carol Tavris is one of those rare writers whose writings are informed by a conscientious reading of research coupled with commonsense conclusions suggestive of easy to understand, helpful behavioral guidance. This book is a winner!
Rating:
Summary: Superb, Intelligent, Informative, Useful Analysis of Anger.
Review: Carol Tavris has written a clear, informative, interesting, and meaningful analysis of anger. She documents the various ways in which anger has been understood versus misunderstood by leading (popular) self-help authors and researchers, and distills from these various treatments helpful guidelines for understanding and managing anger. Carol Tavris is one of those rare writers whose writings are informed by a conscientious reading of research coupled with commonsense conclusions suggestive of easy to understand, helpful behavioral guidance. This book is a winner!
Rating:
Summary: A Good Companion to Lerner's The Dance of Anger.
Review: Carol Tavris offers some very practical advice. Apart from when the expression of anger is intended to dissolve a relationship, anger becomes effective when: (1) the anger is directed at the offending person (telling friends may increase anger); (2) the expression satisfies your need to influence the situation and/or correct an injustice; and, (3) your approach seems likely to change the other person's behavior, which means you can express yourself so they can understand your point of view and so they will cooperate with you. She takes issue with those who would encourage venting. Like Harriet Goldhor Lerner, her goal is change.
Rating:
Summary: A Good Companion to Lerner's The Dance of Anger.
Review: Carol Tavris offers some very practical advice. Apart from when the expression of anger is intended to dissolve a relationship, anger becomes effective when: (1) the anger is directed at the offending person (telling friends may increase anger); (2) the expression satisfies your need to influence the situation and/or correct an injustice; and, (3) your approach seems likely to change the other person's behavior, which means you can express yourself so they can understand your point of view and so they will cooperate with you. She takes issue with those who would encourage venting. Like Harriet Goldhor Lerner, her goal is change.
Rating:
Summary: A serious book worth reading
Review: Dr. Tavris has based this book on serious research on the subject of anger. She debunks many of the pop myths about the purpose of anger and helps the reader to understand the causes of expressed anger. Her central point is that anger is a self-reinforcing mechanism that does not have healthy outcomes in itself. She explains the physiological purpose and effects of anger, pointing out that we really don't need to be angry in our lives.
Instead she suggests various models and techniques to help understand what "sets us off" and how to manage anger. A number of situations are covered and illustrated by personal and clinical examples.
This is not a prescription for a quick fix for quick tempers - while Dr. Tavris is sympathetic about the many reasons why we get angry, she avoids simplistic behavioral techniques as well as overly introspective ones
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Summary: .
Review: I can't say this about very many things or about very many events: this book changed my life. I have to give this book the highest rating because I am not the same person that I was in 1996 when I started reading this book. The changes that I made in my life were not all wrapped around this text, but some of my belief systems were. I referred to the book the same way a person might recall and recite a favorite Bible passage. The area of the book that helped me the most is where Carol describes how the rehashing of painful memories, again and again, and over many year's time, is so damaging. Carol brings up research to show that a primary difference between people who struggle with depression and people who do not is that people with depression are able to vividly and descriptively recount painful memories, no matter how many years have passed, while people who are better adjusted find it difficult to recall such details and relevant information. The person with depression and anger recounts, memorizes, and visualizes horrible events again and again, never seeing the need to let go. The seething and the feelings of betrayal never rest. This person lives out his or her pain on an ongoing basis. The healthier individual survives, learning as he or she goes, but does not feed the anguish. This person moves forward. When I read this information and other information that this book had to offer, I saw myself. I could see that the damage I felt was not what other people had done to me, it was what I had allowed those people to do to me after the fact. In 1996, I had already been moving into the FORGIVENESS mode. Carol's book helped me to move into the ACCEPTANCE mode. It was another step in becoming the person that I needed to be. I applied some of Carol's principles and found that her theories worked well for me. I made the choice to let go of the harmful things of the past, and it was as simple as that. The changes were made slowly over time, but the changes were made. I do not harbor my past under my arm. It is not my constant companion. I see rehashing as the enemy of life, of living. Part of my person was healed. The theorists and the clinician's can debate over this book all they want. But I am a person who bends very little to opinion and philosophy. I found truth in this book and I utilized it. The end.
Rating:
Summary: A very well-done book on an important topic
Review: I first read this book about eight years ago. Though some of Ms. Tavris' analysis is suspect, the vast majority is well-founded and accurate IF YOU APPROACH IT WITH AN OPEN MIND. Unfortunately, simply implying that anger is a learned, self-controllable response provokes a very angry reaction in many people (see other reviews) that makes it hard to get the point across. Tavris has a lot to say. Unfortunately, very few people will listen.
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Summary: An excellent book but many find it hard to swallow
Review: I first read this book about eight years ago. Though some of Ms. Tavris' analysis is suspect, the vast majority is well-founded and accurate IF YOU APPROACH IT WITH AN OPEN MIND. Unfortunately, simply implying that anger is a learned, self-controllable response provokes a very angry reaction in many people (see other reviews) that makes it hard to get the point across. Tavris has a lot to say. Unfortunately, very few people will listen.
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Summary: Isn`t Carol Travis purposely misunderstood ?
Review: I have not written a book ! am not a psychologist or psychoanalyst ! and I am often a very angry person (wife and mother especially and Ms Travis has insight about this kind of problems). I went through therapy thinking I was going to discover some awful thing that had happened in my past but could not uncover anything and I have to come to terms with what is only MY problem eventually. It did make me a more open and dynamic person though and this experience for me was quite well explained by Carol Tavris` book. I think the angry reviews in part misunderstand what she wrote. It is not true that she "ignores the fact that different individuals have learned different ways! of dealing with frustration and anger" as the writer of another book on the subject puts it. She quite acknowledges that. She also thinks anger is useful in certain ways. Please read or re-read her book. It is refreshing, full of humor and yes she has some reason to criticize the ALLMIGHTY UNCONSCIOUS that unconscious shrinks interpret as they wish. Good thing that the unconscious cannot talk back !!!
Rating: 
Summary: A much-needed focus on anger marred by more misunderstanding
Review: It has been sixteen years since Carol Tavris first published this book, and she deserves credit for focusing attention on the terrific confusion in American society surrounding the phenomenon of anger. Dr. Tavris draws on her training and expertise as a social psychologist (not a clinical psychologist or psychotherapist) to presumably enhance the reader's understanding of anger: that undeniably most misunderstood human emotion. In so doing, she attempts to debunk some common assumptions about anger, e.g., that frustration causes anger. But in making her argument against the classic "frustration-aggression hypothesis," Tavris is guilty of cause-and-effect reasoning of the most simplistic, mechanistic and concrete kind. While frustration surely does not always lead to anger in the form of a reflexively automatic, knee-jerk response, and certainly not to aggressive or violent behavior, Tavris ignores the fact that different individuals have learned different ways! of dealing with frustration and anger-- which could explain some of the inconsistencies she finds in the research upon which this theory is based. For example, people who, feeling frustrated, crave ice-cream or head to the nearest multiplex may well feel angry about being frustrated, but be unaware of it; that is to say, they might be unconscious of their anger. The proper inquiry thus turns to how that specific person deals with feelings of frustration and anger--i.e., consciously or unconsciously--instead of whether frustration automatically "causes" anger, or, for that matter, whether anger "causes" aggressive behavior. The ice-cream and movies may be means of ameliorating or avoiding angry feelings rather than, as Tavris suggests, hard, scientific "evidence" that no such emotions are universal in the face of frustration. Indeed, Dr. Tavris does not seem to acknowledge the unconscious in general, leading to a rather superficial analysis and li! mited understanding on her part of the quite complex roots ! of rage and anger. This same misunderstanding of the central role of repressed anger or rage in psychopathology and "madness" in general leads her to yet another mistaken distinction between certain violent eruptions of rage and psychosis. At the same time, Tavris is right in recognizing that one can be angry--even violently enraged--and not technically "psychotic" or "insane." She also makes a valid case against the "ventilationist" mentality underlying various forms of psychotherapy, arguing that far from producing the desired effect of catharsis, rather than "exorcising the anger, . . . can inflame it." These and other well-taken points serve the purpose of pointing our inquiry in the right direction, but Tavris' conclusions fall far short of the mark. Rather than recognizing the crucial importance and vital value of anger--or even rage--to becoming a whole person, she for the most part perpetuates the demonization of this p! rimal, much-needed and potentially creative passion. She seems to take the side of society--and "adjustment" to its sometimes crushing conventions-- against the integrity of the individual, perhaps not such a surprising position for a social psychologist. However, the stifling of anger in the individual for the sake of civility leads not to social harmony and peace but instead to the destructive outbursts of anger and rage we have recently witnessed in American culture. Dr. Tavris' prescription for this so-called senseless violence is to further suppress rather than consciously comprehend and constructively redirect one's anger. It is a misguided prescription that can serve only to promote more madness, evil and continued misunderstanding of the dual-edged, daimonic nature of anger.
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