We all know someone who seems permanently irritated with life. People who complain about everything, criticize everyone, find fault with every situation, and seem to discover a new reason to be outraged every single day. Nothing is ever good enough, nobody can be trusted, the world is unfair, people are incompetent, and after yet another frustration, we may hear an exasperated “I wish everyone would just drop dead!” Sometimes, this person is someone close to us, someone whose company becomes increasingly difficult to endure. At other times, we may recognize in ourselves this tendency to react negatively to almost everything, particularly during periods when disappointments accumulate, and life seems unwilling to meet our expectations.

It is easy to dismiss this behavior as a bad temper, bitterness, or simply a difficult personality. Psychoanalysis, however, invites us to investigate something far more complex, involving not only the origins of this hostility but also the function it serves in a person’s psychic life. Why do certain individuals seem to develop a permanently troubled relationship with the world? What makes a frustration, sometimes a relatively minor one, trigger such an intense reaction? And why does someone remain attached to their anger even when it causes suffering, damages relationships, and seems to push them further away from precisely what they wish to find?

Fiction offers two particularly interesting examples, separated by historical periods, fictional universes, and very different circumstances. In Mike Flanagan’s new adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie, the writer and director gives greater depth to Chris Hargensen, the teenager who leads the bullying against Carrie White and other students. In Vikings, created by Michael Hirst, we encounter one of the most intense portrayals of a character who seems incapable of existing without his own aggression: Ivar the Boneless, played by Alex Høgh Andersen. Although the series draws on historical figures and events, it takes considerable narrative liberties, meaning that Ivar’s psychological characterization belongs primarily to fiction rather than to any historically verified biography of the ninth-century Scandinavian warrior.

The two characters are very different, but they share an important characteristic: they transform their experiences of suffering into hostility toward others. And although their stories cannot be treated as clinical diagnoses, they offer interesting possibilities for reflecting on the unconscious mechanisms involved in aggression, resentment, and the difficulty of working through frustration.

When the World Becomes the Enemy

In Civilization and Its Discontents, published in 1930, Sigmund Freud examines the permanent tension between our individual desires and the demands of living in society. Sharing our lives with others requires limits, sacrifices, and frustrations, since we cannot do everything we want, always receive the recognition we expect, or demand that reality conform to our wishes. For Freud, aggression is not something foreign to human nature; it is part of our psychic constitution and represents one of the greatest challenges of social coexistence. The problem is not simply feeling anger, but how that aggression is experienced, directed, and worked through.

One person may feel outraged by an injustice and find ways to respond to it, while another may experience the same situation as further confirmation that the entire world is against them. In the latter case, reality is no longer perceived in its particularities but becomes a succession of personal offenses. A disagreement turns into an attack, a refusal is interpreted as humiliation, and someone else’s success may provoke resentment, while one’s own frustration appears to prove that nobody recognizes one’s worth. Frequently, the individual does not realize that they are reacting not only to what is happening in the present, but also to earlier experiences that remain psychically active and influence the way current events are interpreted.

It is precisely this repetition that interests psychoanalysis, because different situations can trigger remarkably similar emotional responses. A person changes jobs, ends a relationship, distances themselves from certain friendships, and enters new environments, yet continues to encounter the same injustices, disappointments, and conflicts. This does not mean that the problems are imaginary or that the individual is responsible for everything that happens to them, but it raises the possibility that something in their own subjective position remains unchanged, regardless of external circumstances.

Carrie: When Pain Finds a Victim

In Brian De Palma’s classic 1976 film Carrie, Chris Hargensen, played by Nancy Allen, is portrayed primarily as a popular, cruel, and vindictive young woman. Her hostility toward Carrie intensifies after she is punished by the physical education teacher for taking part in her classmate’s humiliation. Outraged at having to face consequences for her behavior, she takes the punishment personally and decides to seek revenge, setting in motion a chain of tragic events.

In Mike Flanagan’s version, the character acquires a dimension that does not diminish her cruelty but allows us to understand her motivations more clearly. Played by Alison Thornton, Chris has a complicated relationship with her father, marked by his absence and abusive behavior. Her need to control her classmates, humiliate those she considers weaker, and preserve her position of power can also be understood as a reaction to her own helplessness. In an interview with Comic Book Movie, Thornton explained that understanding the reasons behind her character’s choices was one of her main concerns, since Chris acts from a place of pain. The teenager cannot control what happens in her family life, but discovers that she can exercise power over other people, particularly those she perceives as vulnerable.

This portrayal illustrates an important question in psychoanalysis: the person toward whom we direct our anger is not always the person who actually caused it. Nor does it mean that suffering automatically produces aggression or that everyone exposed to an abusive family environment will reproduce violent behavior. What Chris allows us to observe is how an experience of pain may, under certain circumstances, find expression through hostility, particularly when the individual cannot recognize, name, or work through what is happening to them.

Anger as a Defense Against Suffering

In The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, published in 1936, Anna Freud systematized different processes through which the psyche attempts to manage conflicts, desires, and feelings that are difficult to tolerate. One of these is displacement, a mechanism already described by Sigmund Freud, through which an emotion may be redirected from its original object toward another. We might think, for example, of someone who feels profound hostility toward their father but cannot acknowledge or express that feeling. Their anger may find other targets, such as coworkers, partners, friends, or even strangers, producing intense reactions to seemingly trivial situations because they awaken something that extends beyond the immediate event.

In Chris’s case, humiliating Carrie offers a temporary sense of power that is absent from her family life, and her violence can be understood as an attempt to manage experiences she cannot work through. But there is another important question, because anger is not always the most difficult emotion to bear. In some circumstances, it functions as a defense against emotional experiences the individual finds even more threatening, such as sadness, shame, fear, or helplessness. It is less painful to declare that nobody is worth anything than to recognize a profound disappointment with someone we loved, just as attacking others may feel easier than acknowledging the suffering caused by rejection.

In these cases, hostility provides a temporary sense of strength precisely when the individual feels vulnerable or powerless. This does not mean that every irritable person is concealing sadness or fear, but rather that we should investigate whether anger is occupying the place of other emotions they are not yet able to confront. And when we consider this possibility, a particular conversation in Vikings offers an especially significant example.

Ivar the Boneless: When Anger Becomes Identity

In the fourth season of Vikings, specifically in the episode All His Angels, a conversation between Ragnar Lothbrok, played by Travis Fimmel, and his son Ivar stands out as one of the series’ most revealing scenes from a psychological perspective. The two are together shortly before Ragnar’s death, when the father attempts to convince his son that his physical limitations need not prevent him from achieving greatness. Ivar has grown up feeling different from his brothers, struggling with mobility, experiencing humiliation, and living with a permanent conflict between the vulnerability of his body and his need to demonstrate strength.

Ragnar tries to transform what his son perceives as weakness into an advantage, arguing that his intelligence, unpredictability, and, above all, his anger will be essential in making him a feared warrior. Ivar, however, surprises his father by confessing that he wishes he were not angry all the time. Ragnar replies that without his anger, he would be nothing, prompting his son to suggest that perhaps he could have been happy. His father dismisses the importance of happiness, as though it were irrelevant compared with the greatness he envisions for Ivar.

The scene is particularly interesting because Ivar demonstrates that he recognizes the suffering caused by his own aggression. He is not simply proud of being violent or inspiring fear, but manages, for a brief moment, to imagine the possibility of a life that is not permanently dominated by hostility. Yet he receives, precisely from his father, the message that this anger constitutes his defining attribute and that abandoning it would mean losing what makes him special.

There is an important difference between Chris and Ivar. While the teenager in Carrie seems to seek in others compensation for the power she lacks in her family life, Ivar receives from his father a kind of validation of his aggression, as though it were not only necessary for survival but indispensable to his identity. Ragnar recognizes his son’s intelligence and attempts to strengthen him, but does so by associating his value with the ability to inspire fear and turn the humiliations he has endured into revenge.

It is precisely this association that deserves our attention, because some people do not merely feel angry at the world; they begin to recognize themselves through that anger. Aggression ceases to be a reaction to particular circumstances and becomes a characteristic that seems to define the individual, providing an identity, a way of interpreting relationships, and even a justification for behavior. Abandoning this position may provoke unexpected anxiety because the person no longer knows exactly who they would be without something that, for so long, has sustained their way of existing.

Melanie Klein and a World Perceived as Persecutory

Melanie Klein’s theory offers another perspective on generalized hostility. In studying the child’s earliest relationships with objects of love, Klein described mechanisms such as splitting and projection, which are fundamental to understanding certain ways of organizing emotional experience. In what she called the paranoid-schizoid position, the psyche tends to separate good and bad experiences, while feelings that are difficult to tolerate may be projected onto external objects, which then come to be perceived as threatening or persecutory. We are not necessarily talking about a pathological condition or something restricted to childhood, but rather a mode of psychic functioning that may reappear at different stages of life, particularly in situations that provoke intense anxiety.

Under certain circumstances, an individual struggles to recognize that the same person can possess both qualities and flaws, frustrate them and love them, disappoint them and still remain important. The other person becomes entirely bad because they have failed to meet the expectation of being good, and this difficulty with integration may contribute to certain expressions of what we call anger at the world. People cease to be perceived in their complexity and are assigned rigid positions, with the competent opposed to the incompetent, the good to the bad, and the intelligent to the ignorant. Someone who is permanently irritated may believe they simply see reality more clearly than everyone else, without realizing that their interpretation of the world may also be influenced by feelings they cannot recognize within themselves.

Ivar offers an interesting example of this difficulty in tolerating ambivalence, although his behavior should not be reduced to a single explanation. Throughout Vikings, his desire for recognition frequently coexists with profound hostility toward those who appear to threaten his worth, particularly his own brothers. The conflict involves not only struggles for power but also his difficulty coping with the position he believes he occupies within the family and the way he imagines others perceive him. In certain situations, the perception of a threat or humiliation assumes proportions that make coexistence practically impossible.

For Klein, an essential aspect of emotional maturation involves the ability to integrate love and hatred directed toward the same object, recognizing its complexity and tolerating ambivalence. This means understanding that we can love someone and still feel angry with them, acknowledge the qualities of someone who has disappointed us, or accept that an important relationship also involves frustration. When this integration becomes difficult, disappointment can assume devastating proportions because it affects not merely a particular action but appears to destroy the entire image we have constructed of the other person.

Winnicott and the Importance of the Environment

Donald Winnicott also contributes to this discussion through his investigation of the environment’s importance in emotional development. For Winnicott, the development of a sense of security depends, among other things, on sufficiently good experiences of care and emotional holding. This does not mean a perfect childhood or parents who never frustrate their children, but rather the existence of conditions that allow the child to develop trust and gradually cope with reality’s limitations. When these conditions are compromised, certain experiences may leave significant marks on the way an individual establishes relationships and responds to frustration.

In The Antisocial Tendency, Winnicott associates certain antisocial manifestations with experiences of deprivation or the loss of something good that had previously been experienced. In some cases, aggressive behavior may contain a demand directed toward the environment, as though the individual were still searching, in a destructive manner, for some response to a loss they have been unable to process. This contribution allows us to consider certain hostile attitudes not merely as expressions of cruelty, but also as attempts to communicate something that has found no other means of expression.

The relationship between Ragnar and Ivar invites another reflection on the importance of the environment, particularly regarding the way a child receives and incorporates the expectations of those who occupy fundamental places in their life. Ragnar recognizes qualities in his son that others frequently dismiss and attempts to offer him a vision of greatness, but also associates his strength with aggression and revenge. Within the series’ dramatic logic, paternal recognition comes with a demand: Ivar must make those who underestimated him pay for it. In this way, what might have opened space for a less painful relationship with himself ultimately reinforces his identification with hostility.

It is important not to confuse this interpretation with the idea that parents entirely determine their children’s personalities. The psyche does not function so linearly, and similar experiences can produce very different responses. Nevertheless, the scene demonstrates how recognition received from significant people may participate in the construction of identity, including when it links personal worth to characteristics that also cause suffering.

Resentment: When Life Owes Us Something

There is an important difference between feeling anger and turning one’s entire existence into a permanent demand for compensation. In Mourning and Melancholia, published in 1917, Freud investigates the psychic consequences of loss and the difficulties that may arise when an individual cannot work through certain emotional bonds and investments. Although resentment does not automatically correspond to the melancholia described by Freud, his reflections on loss and identification help us consider situations in which a disappointment continues to organize psychic life long after the original event.

Some people remain profoundly attached to what they did not receive, whether it was the love that was missing, the recognition that never came, an injustice that was never repaired, or the success that never materialized. Life should have been different, their parents should have behaved differently, their partner should have understood, and the world should have recognized their efforts. It is important to remember that these demands may have legitimate foundations, because experiences of abandonment, violence, and injustice can leave very real consequences. The problem emerges when the possibility of moving forward becomes conditional upon a form of compensation that may never arrive, and the individual begins organizing their existence around demanding something that can no longer be changed.

Under these circumstances, anger may cease to be merely a reaction to loss and become a way of keeping that loss permanently present. The individual continues demanding that the past should have been different, as though insistence could change what happened, and every new frustration seems to add another item to a long list of accumulated injustices. In Vikings, Ivar’s relationship with the humiliations he believes he has suffered offers a dramatized representation of this difficulty in abandoning the need for compensation. Being respected may not be enough when the individual continues seeking, in present relationships, compensation for every occasion on which they felt diminished.

Working through a painful experience, however, does not mean accepting that it was fair, automatically forgiving, forgetting, or absolving those who caused the suffering. It means being able to recognize the event, its consequences, and the possibility that no form of compensation will be sufficient to erase the experience completely. Relinquishing an impossible demand does not mean admitting that the demand itself was unjustified, and this distinction is essential to understanding the psychic work involved in mourning and resentment.

Lacan: What Would Happen If I Stopped Feeling Angry?

From Jacques Lacan’s perspective, we can investigate the relationship between this anger and the big Other, a concept involving the symbolic field of language, laws, and references that organize our experience. Throughout our lives, we develop expectations about the recognition we will receive, hoping to be loved, valued, and rewarded for our efforts. At some level, we wish there were a guarantee that our choices would produce certain results, as though reality should respond predictably to what we offer.

But no such guarantee exists, and we may do everything we consider right without receiving the recognition we desire, love someone who does not love us back, or dedicate ourselves intensely to a project that ultimately fails. This absence of guarantees can be especially difficult for those who organize their lives around a need for approval or an unconscious expectation of reward. Anger then emerges when the individual repeatedly confronts an Other who fails to respond as expected, producing questions about why things went wrong despite every effort, why others do not reciprocate the devotion they received, or why certain people achieve what the individual cannot.

The conversation between Ragnar and Ivar can also be considered through the relationship between the subject and the signifiers received from the Other. When Ragnar tells his son that he would be nothing without his anger, he offers him a definition of himself that associates his worth with aggression. Ivar, meanwhile, expresses the desire not to have to live permanently dominated by that feeling, but encounters in his father’s response the idea that giving up hostility would mean losing precisely what makes him important.

Lacan also offers the concept of jouissance, an unconscious form of satisfaction that should not be confused with pleasure. It may seem contradictory, but some people suffer because of their own anger while simultaneously finding a form of psychic satisfaction in it. Being permanently outraged can provide an identity in which the individual sees themselves as someone who cannot be fooled, who recognizes other people’s flaws, or who knows how things ought to work. Hostility may provide a sense of moral or intellectual superiority, and each new disappointment ends up reinforcing the image they have constructed of themselves and the world.

In Ivar’s case, aggression is also associated with power, recognition, and the ability to overcome a condition he himself perceives as a disadvantage. His anger allows him to challenge those who underestimate him, but also seems to imprison him in a permanent need to prove his worth. The contradiction emerges precisely when he admits that he wishes he did not feel this way, because in that moment he recognizes that the identity built around hostility comes at an emotional cost.

The clinical question we can draw from this scene is particularly important: what would happen to this individual if he stopped feeling so much anger? Not only how he would relate to others, but how he would come to recognize himself, what place he would find in the world, and how he would deal with the possibility of no longer needing hostility to sustain his own identity.

Why Do Some People Seem to Need an Enemy?

When hostility becomes a habitual way of relating to others, individuals may begin organizing part of their identity in opposition to those around them, recognizing themselves primarily through what they reject or criticize. The existence of an enemy, real or imagined, can offer a relatively stable explanation for their frustrations because, if the problem is always external, there is less need to investigate their own participation in certain choices, expectations, or repetitions. This does not mean that everyone who feels indignant is projecting their conflicts, since real injustices, actual violence, and situations that fully justify anger certainly exist. What interests psychoanalysis is investigating how the individual’s unconscious history participates in their interpretation of reality without denying the existence of that reality.

There is also a particularly painful dynamic in personal relationships, because individuals who are constantly irritated may end up producing precisely the distance they so bitterly lament. They complain that nobody understands them but attack those who try to get close; they desire recognition but disqualify those who might offer it; they feel abandoned but make relationships so difficult that friends, partners, or family members gradually withdraw. A cycle of repetition develops in which hostility contributes to new experiences of rejection, which then appear to confirm the original conviction that nobody is worthwhile or that all relationships inevitably end in disappointment.

In this sense, repetition does not mean that the individual consciously seeks unpleasant situations. Frequently, they cannot perceive how their expectations, reactions, and choices contribute to reproducing similar experiences. It is common for someone to understand a particular behavioral pattern intellectually and nevertheless continue repeating it, because conscious recognition of a conflict does not necessarily amount to its psychic elaboration. The unconscious does not operate according to a linear logic in which identifying the origin of suffering immediately eliminates its effects.

How Does Psychoanalysis Work Through This Anger?

The purpose of analysis is not to transform an irritable individual into someone permanently calm, positive, or resigned, especially since it would be strange to imagine that mental health requires the absence of anger. Indignation can be a necessary response to abuse, injustice, and violated boundaries, and analytic work should not deprive the individual of the ability to recognize or express these feelings. What psychoanalysis seeks to understand is the function anger serves in their life, investigating why certain situations trigger such intense reactions, why they seem repeatedly to encounter the same kind of adversary, and how their relationships end up reproducing similar conflicts.

This process involves free association, attention to repetitions, investigation of defense mechanisms, and analysis of transference, through which aspects of the individual’s relationships with others may reappear within the relationship with the analyst. Someone who constantly complains that nobody understands them may begin to feel that the analyst does not understand them either, while a person who lives in a state of perpetual disappointment may experience the analytic relationship as yet another opportunity to confirm that they will be frustrated. When these experiences can be worked through, they may allow the individual to recognize something about their position toward others and the unconscious expectations that guide their relationships.

This takes time because there is no universal interpretation capable of explaining every expression of hostility. Not all anger conceals sadness, not all resentment originates in childhood, and not all aggressive behavior can be explained by trauma. Every history requires its own listening, and working through a conflict does not happen simply because someone has intellectually understood the reasons for their suffering. What is repeated must have the opportunity to be recognized, associated, and worked through in ways that allow the individual to discover other possible responses instead of remaining trapped in the same reaction.

Pain Explains, but Does Not Excuse

By developing Chris Hargensen’s character in Carrie, Mike Flanagan presents someone who also suffers, even though her way of dealing with that suffering has devastating consequences for others. Alison Thornton’s performance helps make this contradiction visible, allowing us to understand the teenager, recognize the violence of her family history, and perhaps even feel compassion for her without ceasing to condemn her actions. In an interview with Tell-Tale TV, the actress observed that cruelty affects not only those who experience it, but also those who perpetuate it and the entire community around them, a reflection that extends beyond fiction and helps us understand how aggression can spread through relationships.

Ivar, on the other hand, adds a dimension that may be even closer to the experience of some people who enter analysis complaining about their own irritability. He recognizes the constant presence of anger, acknowledges that it causes him suffering, and even imagines that he might live differently, but encounters in his father’s words a reaffirmation that his aggression is precisely what makes him valuable. His story, as constructed by the series, allows us to consider how certain behaviors can remain associated with identity even after the individual begins questioning their effects.

Psychoanalysis does not seek to identify the guilty and the innocent to distribute absolution, but to understand the complexity of psychic functioning, including the mechanisms through which someone may transform their own pain into suffering for others. Recognizing that we have been hurt does not oblige us to hurt other people, just as understanding where our anger comes from does not mean that it will automatically disappear. Discovering that an old experience continues to influence our reactions opens a possibility for working through it, but does not, in itself, interrupt repetition. How often do we hear, or say ourselves, that we understand a particular behavior rationally yet continue reacting in exactly the same way? This contradiction demonstrates how conscious knowledge of an experience does not guarantee that its unconscious traces have been worked through.

Perhaps the most important question is not how to stop feeling angry at the world, but how to stop needing that anger to sustain our own existence. The person who is always irritated, who despises everyone and wishes the world would explode, may also be imprisoned in a way of interpreting reality in which every experience confirms a previous expectation of disappointment. As long as everything and everyone is perceived as a threat, an offense, or a source of resentment, there will be little room to experience relationships that are not already marked by hostility.

In that conversation with Ragnar, Ivar manages to articulate a possibility that his father immediately dismisses: perhaps he would be happier if he did not feel so much anger. It is a possibility he can barely sustain, but one that reveals something important about his suffering, because by imagining a different existence, he recognizes that his aggression does not have to be confused with the entirety of who he is. Psychic elaboration may begin precisely when the individual becomes able to question what they have long considered an immutable part of their identity, realizing that although their history cannot be erased, it does not have to determine every response they make.

Working through anger, therefore, does not mean ceasing to recognize life’s injustices, but developing the ability to recognize them without turning one’s entire existence into an endless succession of injustices.