Adolescent anger

Adolescent hostility, resentment, blame, and reproach are dynamically determined and serve important defensive, alloplastic, and restitutional aims. The author examines how these negative affects, the accompanying victim role, and oppositional defiance enable angry adolescents to defend against depression and loss, to demand nurturance from others, to protect their precarious inner autonomy, and to undo their humiliation and shame by vengeance and reversal. The author suggests that adolescent anger arises from an underlying wish to coerce objects into providing all-giving restitution for losses and narcissistic injuries, not necessarily from a wish to sadistically or enviously destroy them.