Anger, violence, and fear.

Introduction: Anger is a universal emotion, sometimes expressed maladaptively and violently. The literature has highlighted some limitations in the therapeutic pathways, related to diagnosis, the effectiveness of interventions, and alliance. Another way could include a diagnosis of primary functioning and related feelings. This abstract will present some findings concerning fear. Methods: An ad hoc questionnaire is administered to a sample of inmates for violent offenses (33 subjects). The data were compared with a non-clinical sample using the Mann-Whitney U-test. Results: The belief that one's anger may be related to some fear belongs more to the non-clinical than to the inmates (49.8 vs. 30.3%). Significant differences emerge in the typology of the fears, in particular among the inmates the fear of being mistreated (p = .000), fear of being eliminated (p = .002), fear of not knowing how to defend oneself (p = .005), fear of feeling humiliated (p = .028), fear of being judged as inept (p = .041) and fear of succumbing (p = .042) are more frequent. There is no difference when investigating the existence, in childhood and in the past, of people who had aroused fear (45% vs. 45.5%), but there is a difference in the way the subjects think about the child they were and who was afraid. In prisoners, grief (p =.001), shame (p =.001) contempt (p =.000) and anger (p =.001) are prevalent in non-prisoners, tenderness (p = .046). The feeling of having to keep a dangerous part of oneself at bay is shared by 34.3% of the inmates vs. 20.1 % of the controls. For this one that feeling is linked to the concern that anger is never legitimate, whereas the inmates are continually focused on themselves, feeling potentially dangerous and afraid of what they might do (p =.000). Discussion: It would thus seem that fear is an element to be carefully investigated and evaluated, both in current experiences and in the processing of childhood experiences in which it was suffered. In particular, difficulties in processing can be understood within the framework of a primary functioning deficit.