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483

The
British
Psychological
British Journal of Psychology (2006), 97, 483–498
q 2006 The British Psychological Society
Society

www.bpsjournals.co.uk

‘I was like a wild wild person’:

Understanding feelings of anger using
interpretative phenomenological analysis

Virginia Eatough* and Jonathan Smith

School of Psychology, Birkbeck University of London, UK

This paper is concerned with illuminating how emotion (anger) and emotion-related
phenomena such as feelings, thoughts and expressions appear to the individual person.
In particular, it focuses on the role of feelings in emotion experience. It does this
through the qualitative analysis of interview material from a single person case study
using interpretative phenomenological analysis. The paper examines how the
participant feels and experiences anger, the defining characteristics of anger episodes,
and how the typical pattern of these episodes is disrupted by life-changes. The findings
are examined in light of phenomenological ideas and the utility of these ideas for
psychology’s understanding of emotion argued for.

This paper is concerned with illuminating how emotion (anger) and emotion-related
phenomena such as feelings, thoughts and expressions appear to the individual person.
In particular, it focuses on the role of feelings in emotion experience, that ‘what it is like’
aspect. We suggest that understanding emotion experience necessitates comprehend-
ing feelings – they tell us about an emotion from the perspective of the person who is
having that emotion. It is our belief that emotions become intelligible when we consider
them from the personal perspective.
LeDoux (1998) suggested that feelings were nothing more than ‘red herrings,
detours in the scientific study of emotions’ (p. 18). Recently, Frijda (2005) and Lambie
and Marcel (2002) have challenged this view drawing attention to (a) their crucial part in
motivational states, learning and the maintenance of a coherent sense of self and world
and (b) how emotion experience is a legitimate interest in its own right, not least
because it has significance for people. Lambie and Marcel point to how current thinking
has shifted towards a component view of emotion with emotion experience being one
such component (e.g. Lazarus, 1991; Ortony, Clore, & Collins, 1988). However, emotion
theorists tend to focus on one or other components, for example cognitive theories
which give the concept of appraisal centre place (e.g. Ellsworth, 1991; Frijda, 1993;
Lazarus, 1991; Smith & Lazarus, 1993).

* Correspondence should be addressed to Virginia Eatough, School of Psychology, Birkbeck University of London, Malet Street,
London WC1 7HX, UK (e-mail: v.eatough@bbk.ac.uk).

DOI:10.1348/000712606X97831
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484 Virginia Eatough and Jonathan Smith

According to Frijda (2005), the nature and content of emotion experience has been
variously described as bodily feelings (e.g. Damasio, 1994, 2003; James, 1884),
indescribable qualia (e.g. Oatley & Johnson-Laird, 1987; Plutchik, 1980) or as pleasure
or pain states joined with felt activation (e.g. Russell, 2003). Frijda goes on to say that
these understandings, although not incorrect, fail to do justice to how people describe
what it is like when they have an emotion experience; what it is like to feel joyful or to
feel anger. These experiences:
present feelings as experiences of the world or of oneself, both carrying meanings, of one’s
relationship to them, and of one’s striving in relation to them : : : Such emotion experience
is best characterized as a perception of a meaningful world that is filled with calls for action.
(Frijda, 2005, p. 474)
It is clear then that emotion experience can take different forms because of the different
contexts in which such experiences occur. Moreover, emotion experiences are often
world-focused rather than self-focused – they are directed outwards towards the world,
and the people, events and objects that make up that world. These comments indicate
that a more holistic approach to understanding emotion experience is required, one
which focuses on the embodied person who is ‘world-involved’ (Moran, 2000, p. 233).
Lambie and Marcel draw attention to the paucity of psychological research which
addresses what they call first-order phenomenology (exceptions include Davitz, 1969;
Parkes, 1996). Characterization of first-order emotion phenomenology is more typically
the domain of phenomenology and our aim in this paper is to contribute to existing
psychological research from this theoretical perspective.
Our phenomenological standpoint draws heavily on the work of the philosopher
Peter Goldie (2002), and it is to a brief summary of his argument that we now turn. That
emotions are intentional is an uncontroversial viewpoint (Averill, 1997; Sartre, 1994;
Solomon, 1993). When you are angry, you are angry at someone, when you experience
pity, it is pity for someone and so on. However, in what ways are emotions intentional?
Goldie criticizes emotion theories which conceptualize intentionality solely in terms of
beliefs, or beliefs and desires, arguing that this leaves feelings out of the emotion
experience. Feelingless belief-desire accounts overintellectualize emotion and typically
incorporate feelings as an add-on, perhaps as the awareness of physiological change and
which lack intentionality. Alternatively, Goldie proposes an intentionality of feelings,
what he calls feeling towards, a thinking of with feeling that is directed toward the
object of one’s thought. To illustrate this point, he considers the example, ‘I am afraid of
the snake because its bite is poisonous and poison would harm me’. (Taylor, 1985, p. 2)
and says:
I believe that many of our emotional experiences are not like this: there seems to be too
much talk of belief, and not enough talk of feeling, perception, and imagination. The point is
not easy to express, but what often happens, I think, is that we first have an emotional
response towards an object, a feeling which is often quite primitive : : : Then, in self-
interpretation, when we become reflectively aware of this feeling towards the object of the
emotion (as we reflective beings are sometimes able to do), we also normally seek to make it
intelligible by looking for [the] identificatory and explanatory beliefs : : : What really comes
first is the emotional response itself – the feeling of fear towards the snake – and not
the thought that its bite is poisonous and the thought that poison would harm me. (Goldie,
2002, p. 45)
For Goldie, feeling towards is not always ‘fully cognitively penetrable’ (p. 78) and it is
this quality which distinguishes it from belief. In addition to feeling towards are feelings
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Anger, feelings, and interpretative phenomenological analysis 485

of bodily changes, that sense of ‘what it is like’ bodily to experience an emotion. One
way of understanding emotion experience is to attempt to capture it from the personal
point of view because emotions and emotion experience are always embedded in a
person’s narrative.
Following Goldie, we define emotions as complex, episodic, dynamic and
structured. They are complex because of the varied elements which make them up
such as thoughts, perceptions, feelings and episodes of emotion experience. It is a
feature of these various elements that they can come and go over time in a dynamic and
episodic manner. Finally, emotions are structured because they form an integral part of
the evolving order of thoughts and feelings, actions and events which go to make up the
lifeworld of the individual.
Thus, this study attempts to grasp what anger feels like for the individual in the
context of their life and all that that entails. It does this through the analysis of interview
material from a single person case study. The method is idiographic because it
emphasizes the importance of the individual as a unit of analysis (Smith, 2004; Smith,
Harré, & Van Langenhove, 1995). An idiographic approach is committed to the detailed
examination of a phenomenon as it is experienced and given meaning in the lifeworld of
a person. Our aim is to show the value of a phenomenological approach for
understanding emotion.
The data are analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA; Smith,
2004). IPA is one of several closely related approaches described as phenomenological
psychology, and its central concern is the subjective experiences of the individuals –
what we have been calling, from an existential phenomenological perspective, the
lifeworld of the individual. IPA acknowledges that it is not possible to access an
individual’s lifeworld directly because there is no clear and unmediated window into
that life. Investigating how events and objects are experienced and given meaning
requires interpretative activity on the part of the researcher, which Smith and Osborn
(2003) describe as a dual process in which ‘the participants are trying to make sense of
their world; the researcher is trying to make sense of the participants trying to make
sense of their world’ (p. 51). IPA has now been used to examine a wide range of
psychological topics e.g.: European social identity (Chryssochoou, 2000); affective
aspects of travel choice (Mann & Abraham, 2006); awareness in Alzheimer’s disease
(Clare, 2003); identity change and life transitions (Smith, 1994). For a review of work in
IPA, see Reid, Flowers, and Larkin (2005).
IPA is a distinctly psychological qualitative approach and can be described as
experiential research in contrast to discursive research (Reicher, 2000). For IPA, the
focus is more on understanding, representing and making sense of peoples’ ways of
thinking, their motivations, actions and so on whereas for discourse analysis, the
emphasis is on the ways in which language constructs people’s worlds, the performative
aspects of talk. Although IPA recognizes the importance of language in influencing how
individuals make sense of lived experiences and then in turn how researchers make
sense of participants’ sense making, it can be described as taking a light constructionist
stance in contrast to the strong constructionism of discourse analysis. Our talk may be
action oriented and functions to achieve our interpersonal objectives but IPA suggests
that the lived life with its vicissitudes is much more than historically situated linguistic
interactions between people.
For instance, even if emotions and emotionality are discursive acts which can be
analysed ‘something like conversations’ (Harré & Gillett, 1994, p. 154), we would argue
that they are also more than this. For IPA, how people feel about and attach meaning to
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486 Virginia Eatough and Jonathan Smith

the psychologically forceful and often indefinable aspects of their emotional life has
implications for their life beyond the specific local interaction. Personal accounts of
emotional experience are also concerned with human potential and development, with
making our lives by connecting the past with the present and future; they are
‘imaginative enterprises’ (Reissman, 1992, p. 232). Thus, IPA sees the person as an
experiencing, meaning making, embodied and discursive agent.
Unlike discourse analysis, IPA shares with social cognition a concern with
unravelling the relationship between what people think (cognition), say (account) and
do (behaviour), although both epistemologically and methodologically this concern
manifests itself differently. Cognition, broadly speaking, is a vital aspect of human
existence for phenomenological thinkers. For instance, Husserl was concerned with
‘the experiences in which something comes to be grasped as known’ (Moran, 2000,
p. 108). From the perspective of IPA, cognitions are not isolated separate functions but
an aspect of being-in-the-world. IPA, similar to cognitive psychology, gives cognition a
central role, but its way of construing is very different. It is more akin to how some
artificial intelligence theorists drawing on phenomenology talk of structural couplings
in which ‘Thinking is not detached reflection but part of our basic attitude to the world’
(Mingers, 2001, p. 110).
We believe phenomenology generally and IPA specifically can make a valuable
contribution to furthering psychological understanding of emotion experience. IPA’s
idiographic emphasis and commitment to the case study approach allows for an
enriched and developing understanding of the anger experience and brings to the fore
the complexity of human meaning making. It draws attention to how the interpersonal,
material and social contexts of the individual life alter the expression of anger, giving rise
to different consequences, and affecting the sense of self.
In sum, a central concern of phenomenology is how the world appears to the
individual. This is adhered to in the analysis that follows which privileges the
participant’s own accounts of experiences of anger. In practical terms, it is only later
that the emergent analysis is examined in light of the extant literature and theoretical
relationships established. With IPA, it is not the case that the analysis is driven by
theoretically derived categories.

Method
Participant
All names in the paper have been changed to safeguard confidentiality. We have chosen
to call the participant Marilyn. At the time of the study Marilyn was 30 years old, and
living with her partner John and their son Andrew in a council home in an inner-city area
of the Midlands. In terms of social need the area is categorized as extreme and has
correspondingly high levels of crime. Marilyn left school at 16 and has worked in a
variety of unskilled jobs. Since having Andrew, she does not work outside the home.

Data collection
Initially, Marilyn was to be one of the participants in a small-scale study looking at how
women experience and resolve conflict in their lives. However, the depth, richness and
texture of Marilyn’s narrative led to the decision to change the focus of the project and
to carry out a detailed idiographic case study. After an initial telephone conversation, the
first author met Marilyn at her home to discuss what participation in the study would
entail. The study had ethical approval and Marilyn signed a consent form.
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Anger, feelings, and interpretative phenomenological analysis 487

An interview schedule was developed and the first author carried out two semi-
structured interviews over a period of 3 weeks, which resulted in 4 hours of data. The
interviews took place in Marilyn’s home and were recorded onto a mini-disk recorder.
Although there were specific issues we were hoping to address, the primary aim was for
Marilyn to tell her story and not simply be a respondent. When people tell the stories of
their lives, they do so in particular ways. They make reference to actual events in space
and time, and they suffuse these events with meaning and significance. The interview
aimed to capture the richness and complexity of Marilyn’s emotional experiences of
anger. Thus, it progressed down avenues Marilyn opened up rather than those dictated
by the schedule. The interview data were transcribed in full.

Analysis
IPA is not a prescriptive approach; rather, it provides a set of flexible guidelines, which
can be adapted by individual researchers in light of their research aims (Smith &
Dunworth, 2003; Smith, Jarman, & Osborn, 1999; Smith & Osborn, 2003). The
procedure adopted in this study involved treating the interviews as one set of data. The
stages used throughout the analysis were as follows: the transcript was read several
times and the left-hand margin used to make notes of anything that appeared significant
and of interest. With each reading, the researcher should expect to feel more ‘wrapped
up’ in the data, becoming more responsive to what is being said. The second stage
involved returning to the transcript afresh and using the right-hand margin to transform
initial notes and ideas into more specific themes or phrases, which calls upon
psychological concepts and abstractions. This process moves between inductive and
deductive positions; the participant’s account can bring to light issues unanticipated by
the researcher and their questions, and the researcher taking a theoretically sensitive
stance begins to think about how these issues can be conceptualized. For IPA, this
interplay means that as the analysis progresses existing psychological theory can be
endorsed, modified and/or challenged. At this stage of analysis caution is essential so
that the connection between the participant’s own words and the researcher’s
interpretations is not lost. These early stages of analysis require the researcher to be
thorough and painstaking; the third stage consists of further reducing the data by
establishing connections between the preliminary themes and clustering them
appropriately. These clusters are given a descriptive label (higher-order theme title)
which conveys the conceptual nature of the themes therein. Smith (2004) suggests that
researchers ‘Imagine a magnet with some of the themes pulling others in and helping to
make sense of them’ (p. 71).
Finally, a table is produced that shows each higher-order theme and the subthemes
which comprise it. A brief illustrative data extract is presented alongside each theme.
This table is the outcome of an iterative process in which the researcher has moved back
and forth between the various analytic stages ensuring that the integrity of what the
participant said has been preserved as far as possible. If the researcher has been
successful, it should be possible for someone else to track the analytic journey from the
raw data through to the end table. An ‘independent audit’ of this type was conducted
(Smith, 2003).
The analytic process reworks and refines researcher understandings and
interpretations in an iterative fashion until some degree of closure is reached.
Finally, a narrative account of the interplay between the interpretative activity of the
researcher and the participant’s account of the experience in their own words is
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488 Virginia Eatough and Jonathan Smith

produced. Analysis continues into this formal process of writing up. The researcher
should aim to provide a close textual reading of the participant’s account, moving
between description and different levels of interpretation, at all times clearly
differentiating between them. Enough data should be presented for the reader to
assess the fit between the participant’s accounts and the researcher’s understanding
of them. It is important that this understanding is coherent and integrated; nuances
from the participant’s accounts should be retained, and at the same time they
should be embedded in a framework which accounts for the phenomenon under
investigation (Elliott, Fischer, & Rennie, 1999).

Results
This section reports on one of the higher-order themes derived from the analysis. First, it
presents an account of how Marilyn feels and experiences anger and considers how,
over time, Marilyn’s anger has followed a typical and well-trod sequence of events in the
context of her intimate interpersonal relationships. The defining characteristics that
accompany these anger events are charted: emotional intensity and escalation. Second,
we examine how the birth of Marilyn’s son has disrupted these long-standing features
and altered the pattern of Marilyn’s anger expression. Thus, the analysis embeds specific
emotion experiences in the context of Marilyn’s lifeworld.

‘I was like a wild wild person’

Marilyn experiences anger as an emotion which gains ground and slowly takes her over,
regardless or not of provocation by the actions of others. In this first extract, Marilyn
describes the feeling of bodily changes that she experiences during a typical episode:

It’s an emotion that I can’t control you know : : : how I actually physically feel is like
trembling, very hot and emotionally really tearful, erm and actually physically, not
physically, just picturing in my mind what I’m going to do like the split second before and
then I’ll do it. Do you understand what I’m trying, getting at. You know like say I could be
sitting here I’m getting mad and I can picture in my mind that I’m going to swipe all these
ornaments and then just that split second as it’s gone to my head I just do it. It’s like, it’s
weird.

Marilyn experiences trembling and heat, feelings which suggest intensity and that are
accompanied by tears. Time seems to be experienced as slowing down. This is captured
in her account of the ‘split second’ before the act, which is reflective, leisurely ‘I could
be sitting here’, and engaging the listener ‘do you understand what I’m trying : : : ’ Thus,
rather than just recreating the ‘madness’, she is carefully describing the process of
‘getting mad’ and this process appears phenomenologically to take far more than the
split second in which it occurred. The stretching of time seems to give the anticipation
of action the power of premonition. Once the outcome is about to be realized, then the
sense of time speeds up and as Marilyn says, ‘it’s gone to my head, I just do it’. Marilyn
can ‘see’ what is going to happen, she knows the outcome but she feels that she has no
control over it. This experience of ‘knowing’ what is going to happen yet being unable
to prevent it suggests a similarity to the accounts of people who have survived accidents
such as car, train or plane crashes. On a more mundane level, many of us can recall
events that are foreshadowed by a sense of the outcome. The narrative threads of the
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Anger, feelings, and interpretative phenomenological analysis 489

sequence are ones of increasing intensity of feeling and escalation into actual acts of
aggression.
The next extract further exemplifies how the anger experience is one of great
intensity for Marilyn. She is not invoking symbolic images (e.g. I felt like I was going into
a rage), rather what she describes is a literal stepping into a transformed state, one of
rage and fury. The sense of mounting tension and escalation culminates in the
expression of extreme feelings and action. The repeated use of the word wild implies a
transformation from a rational civilized person into an irrational uncivilized animalistic
being:
I: Can you recall what it felt like?

M: I used to go in a rage, really rage. I mean, I could just, I could, I mean it was really sudden
the rage. I mean, I could be sat here talking, I mean never with anybody else but I could sit
here talking to him [Marilyn’s former partner] and he’d just say one word you know that you
know sort of got to me or that I didn’t like and that was it and I’d start arguing with him and I’d
really go in a rage and trash the bedsit and just go mad. I was like a wild wild person you know.
A point of interest here is how Marilyn creates a narrative which enables her to make
some sort of sense out of the experienced anger episode. Instead of citing provocation
as an excuse, she portrays a situation in which she is an object who becomes a ‘wild’
person because of external and internal forces. In effect, she is the excuse in that she
invokes the behaviour as a consequence of who she is. The one word may have been
provocative but by not construing it as such, she represents her emotion and behaviour
as illogical and arbitrary. Marilyn’s depiction of her anger as a powerful force constructs
a self which is experienced as non-agentic. Moreover, becoming a ‘wild person’ is at
odds with those qualities which are powerfully associated with being a woman:
peaceful, gentle and harmonious.
Marilyn’s anger is felt as controlling, swamping and engulfing her. The
phenomenological field is of an altered state in emotional, behavioural and physiological
terms. Emerging out of this altered state leaves Marilyn feeling bewildered and ‘weird’
with little or no recollection of what has happened. Time has not only slowed down and
sped up, but has been lost. A habitual pattern is easily discerned in that feelings of anger
make an appearance and slowly gain control culminating in a repeated end state in
which Marilyn remembers little of the course of events gone before. The two extracts
below illustrate clearly how Marilyn experiences this lost time. Moreover, the first
extract provides further support for the claim that the themes of intensity and escalation
act as narrative threads which are woven together to form common micro-narratives.
The first data extract illustrates how what begins as ‘a talk’ moves relentlessly through
various emotion and physical states and ends in violence, while the second reiterates the
typical end-point:
And I remember we were, it started as a talk, you know I think you’re seeing somebody else
type thing and he’s denying it and then I’m getting madder and madder because I convinced
myself that he is and I’m getting more and more frustrated because he’s denying it to me.
But he hasn’t but I’m I’m just totally gone into it, you know. I’ve thought he is seeing
somebody else. And I started off like, it starts as a talk and then it gets louder and louder and
then I just lose all sort of control and I swipe all the ornaments off tables and units and that
and then I’ll probably smash a mirror. I think in that incident it was a mirror, threw my wrist
at the mirror. And erm, he came over to see if I was alright, I mean he was really
understanding, nobody should put up with it but he was quite understanding. And he
comes up to me and then I started hitting him. But I can how I feel is, I can feel myself
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490 Virginia Eatough and Jonathan Smith

getting hotter and hotter and erm it’s like I feel my blood pressure boiling and I can feel my
face going up red and just hate, hate anything anybody that’s in my way. I don’t know, I
sometimes go a bit blank as well, you know, I can’t remember a lot of what I’ve said or done.

It feels, it’s weird with me, you don’t, I mean you know you’re being mad or you know
you’re doing things but you don’t actually recall what you’ve done, you know, you don’t
recall, I don’t know, picking up a glass and throwing it at somebody and hitting somebody
‘til afterwards when you’ve seen the state of the room and the state of the person that’s in
there with you.

There are several points of interest to be noted in the above extracts. Marilyn is both
protagonist and initiator of a familiar script, a script which is played out invariably in the
domestic arena. As at other times, the initial stage is one of dialogue, ‘it started as a talk’.
At the outset she is not visibly angry; rather, there is a sense that Marilyn is swept along
as she becomes caught up in the situation, ‘I’m getting madder and madder because I
convinced myself that he is’, until her anger reaches a point of transition, ‘I’m just totally
gone into it’. The ‘it’ she steps into is the altered state and the experience is one of
overwhelming intensity.
Once again, images of tremendous heat and great rage and fury are invoked. The
targets of her aggression and violence are seemingly indiscriminate; her anger is such
that she feels her blood pressure ‘boiling’, and the accompanying emotional experience
is ‘just hate, hate anything anybody that’s in my way’. On every level, this appears to be
an extreme experience, and its intensity suggests that Marilyn is no longer aware of what
is happening. The visible consequences of her aggression suggest a transformation
which results in behaviour that is inexplicable to her once she has returned to normality.
Marilyn’s descriptions not only convey the experiential intensity of her anger, but they
also suggest feelings of powerlessness. The emotion overwhelms her bodily and
cognitively.
In sum, the typical sequence of events in an anger episode follows a path that moves
inexorably from talk through to actual physical violence. These events typically contain
dissociative episodes in which Marilyn’s thoughts, emotions and actions appear to be
separate from Marilyn and (seemingly) function independently. This experience gives
rise to a sense of having no control, and feelings of powerlessness. The next section
examines how in Marilyn’s present domestic arrangements these events, with their
narrative characteristics of intensity and escalation, are upset and undermined. The
section aims to illustrate the dynamic nature and temporal dimension of our emotion
experiences, and how they are always part of a bigger picture.

‘Because I’ve got Andrew I can’t go off like I used to’

Marilyn attributed her anger and aggressive behaviour to drinking, and she described her
relationship with John as ‘alcohol violent’. This belief, coupled with finding herself
pregnant, led to her attempting to stop drinking. However, despite this belief and her
awareness of social norms against drinking when pregnant, Marilyn’s anger and
aggression persisted:
I: Can you see any pattern in your relationships, I mean, was it actually things they were
doing or do you think it was something else that was making you angry?

M: Well, I stopped drinking a few months after I met my present partner [John] and the
aggression stopped but then it’s creeping back again and I still don’t drink and it’s creeping
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Anger, feelings, and interpretative phenomenological analysis 491

back again erm, well it’s not creeping it come up quick actually you know I started being
aggressive towards him again.
Yet again, there is the sensation of a force gaining power inexorably over Marilyn,
escalating her into familiar patterns of affect and behaviour. Andrew’s birth coupled
with the realization that stopping drinking was not the solution meant that Marilyn had
to develop alternative ways of expressing her anger. Here, she is describing how she
now reacts to what she calls John’s ‘tormentative’ behaviour:
M: I swear at him (laughs) I just walk out but that that, little things wind me up and I think,
he’s a bit hyperactive as well because sometimes he goes on a roll you know where he’s
doing it constantly and by the end of the day I’ve had enough and I’ll punch him but not in
his face or anything like that, I punch him on his arm just to calm him down a bit but it don’t
calm him down a bit (we both laugh) it’s, makes me feel better as well cos I’ve let off some
aggression a bit of steam off type of thing but I mean I’m not violent as in previous
relationships, it’s a different, a lot of it is now moods, erm my mood swings, sulking.

I: So what do you think brought about the change?

M: Andrew, he picks up on my aggression now. So if I was like what I was with previous
relationships, I mean he’s confused now so I mean that’s why I’ve gone to see a counsellor.
This extract demonstrates a clear qualitative shift in Marilyn’s aggressive behaviour as
well as highlighting the importance of Andrew as an inhibiting presence. There is still an
undercurrent of intensity but the narrative thread of escalation is largely absent. Instead
of letting her anger ‘build’ over time and ‘discharge’ itself in acts of physical aggression,
Marilyn uses a range of strategies. For example, walking away can be seen as an attempt
at conflict avoidance rather than escalation.
Although Marilyn admits to still using verbal and physical aggression, there is a sense
of restraint in that actual physical violence towards John is largely replaced with volatile
changes in mood, and when it does result in some form of physical aggression, Marilyn
normally exercises restraint. Moreover, a shift to ‘mood swings’ and ‘sulking’ behaviour
can also be described as more congruent with gender expectations and norms.
Andrew’s presence suggests that Marilyn heeds any warning signs, indicating a less
passive role in relation to her anger. For example, in the following extract, the inert
metaphor of a pressure cooker is challenged by more empathic feelings of shame and
distress:
M: : : : I tend to just break down and cry now

I: yeah, I was going to ask you what your response was now?

M: Yeah, I just tend to break down and cry, I don’t, I’m just upset at myself, upset then for
me doing it, upset because I’ve broke, trashed things and so..

I: so it’s not as if there’s any, is there any sense of relief or is it just upset?

M: No, it’s more, I think it’s more upset. I’d always have a release there though. I think it’s
like erm, it’s like a let-down, not a let-down as in..have you ever breastfed?

I: yeah.

M: You know what the let-down feeling is?..

I: mmn, mmn.

M: : : : it’s like that, it’s like that a release from it, a pressure, a steamer.
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492 Virginia Eatough and Jonathan Smith

I: yeah, I know what you’re saying.

M: It’s like a pressure cooker, a steamer coming off. I think there is quite a lot of crying
from that but it’s more upset because of what I’ve done and probably guilt.
Here, Marilyn’s account is ambiguous and contradictory. Initially, she says the change in
her behaviour does not bring any release. However, this claim is not sustained and we
would suggest that in spite of the crying, which carries with it an implicit marker of
frustration (see below), Marilyn achieves some partial release of her feelings of anger.
Furthermore, we would argue that what is different is that feelings of shame and guilt
are present, and that these are a direct consequence of having a child. This
interpretation is exemplified in the data below.
Thus, within the specific context of Marilyn and John’s relationship, there is a
dampening down of the behavioural expressions of fury and rage that characterized
previous relationships. However, this should not be taken to mean that Marilyn has
achieved some sort of resolution in terms of her anger and aggression. The typical
episode of anger and aggression expression is replaced within this context, at least, by
episodes in which the emotion and behaviour are suppressed. For example, the
following extracts demonstrate how crying and withdrawal behaviour has largely
replaced the physical aggression:

It’s like now if I’m mad I cry out of frustration because I’ve got Andrew I can’t go off like I
used to. I think you have to grow up a bit, I mean, I do cry all the time when I go into a rage.

I know that I can’t, it’s usually at night in the evening and I know I can’t go in a rage because
I’ll wake Andrew up so I suppose a lot of it is frustration because I can’t vent my anger at
him and some things, you know as they say the truth hurts, sometimes you know it’ll hit a
raw nerve and what he’s said is true and it does upset me. I either sit here like this with tears
streaming down or I’ll go upstairs on the playstation out of the way. I won’t get into an
argument basically. I don’t know, I can’t think about.

Although, the felt intensity of Marilyn’s anger is still evident, she argues she does not
allow it to gain ground. Rather, it is suppressed, and the typical end-point of a
disassociative reaction is replaced with one of crying and frustration, or withdrawal. For
many women crying is a culturally significant gender congruent expression of anger
which rarely achieves satisfaction. Rather, control and suppression of anger often fuels
feelings of intense frustration and confusion.
In the previous extract, Marilyn makes explicit reference to Andrew fulfilling an
inhibitory and restraining function with respect to her anger and aggression. When
Marilyn talks of having to ‘grow up a bit’, she is recognizing the responsibility that
comes with having a child. Having children and getting older in years implies that one
should be more responsible. Women continue to be the primary caretakers of children,
and most women are keenly aware that society holds them accountable for their
children’s actions through close scrutiny of their own behaviour. However, as the next
extract shows, breaking well-established behaviour patterns is not easy which results in
Andrew becoming a target:
M: I am getting worried because I’m getting (pause) more erm verbally to Andrew and I
really really smacked him the other day. And I just sat down and cried me eyes out, I just
don’t want, I don’t believe in smacking kids.

I: what had he done?

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Anger, feelings, and interpretative phenomenological analysis 493

M: He’d broke a vase. I’d told him not to throw. He threw this toy at his dad and it bashed
into the table. I told him not to throw and he threw it again and this vase, it was a present,
just smashed. And I picked him up by his shirt to sling him on the settee, not hard but you
know just threw him on my settee. And I slapped him three times I mean once’d have done
to tell him off but I did it three times and it really got, even John said you’ve gone a bit too far.
And I was crying me eyes out because I just don’t like smacking him, I just don’t believe at
all smacking kids.

I: and what did you do after you smacked him, was Andrew upset, did you talk to Andrew?

M: Yeah, I said to him that I’m really sorry. I said Mummy don’t like smacking you, mummy
don’t like smacking you at all, and I told him I was really sorry but he was crying, he was
upset. He was shocked as well.
Unsurprisingly, this account is very different from those first presented. The narrative
threads of intensity and escalation are absent and in their place is a not unusual parental
response to provocation and possible frustration which Marilyn immediately regrets and
apologizes for. As evidenced by the ‘pressure cooker’ extract, Marilyn experiences
feelings of guilt and shame in her aggressive interactions since Andrew was born. These
emotions are implicit in her repeated statements that she does not believe in physically
punishing children. Additionally, when her son is the target, the experience is one of
worry that she will go too far with disastrous consequences:
Yeah, that’s mainly why I went to the doctor erm because I’ve started shouting at him a lot
and there was, first instance, I grabbed him by his arm, I picked him up and threw him on
the settee because he was [indecipherable]. And I says that’s it I need help because I am not
starting on my son you know. I mean he’s already picking up on hitting his dad, he sees me
hitting him and he hits his dad as well you see and I was going to go and seek help but I think
that was [the] final thing were I picked him up, I picked him up like a rag doll. I mean I
didn’t hurt him as in but it was a shock for him and erm I’ve I’ve really biting my tongue but
at the time I could I really could, I could go in a rage at him. But I think to myself if I ever did
I’d kill him because he’s so small, you know, I can’t, there’s something that stops you.
Marilyn is explicitly constructing her anger as problematic and she recognizes the need
to exercise restraint. Her decision to seek help is twofold: she does not want her son
emulating her aggressive behaviour and she does not want to harm him. However, in
spite of this attempt to exercise control (or perhaps because of it), Marilyn does not
experience herself as being in control:
Erm, I feel really desperate, I ses I can’t go on with living like this. I haven’t got a life, it’s
really taking over my life and I ses I’m getting worse with my son and I don’t want to hurt
him. It is, things are picked up. You know, I mean, if he’s getting brought up with an
aggressive parent, it’s like abuse isn’t it, carried on generation to generation. I don’t want
that and I can see that if I carry on I can picture it in my mind, him being an abuser.
In this extract, there is a strong sense of an internal struggle taking place for Marilyn. She
shows a clear awareness of the potential consequences if she loses control but the effort
is so great that it induces feelings of desperation. Moreover, as already noted, Marilyn is
only too aware of cultural expectations of appropriate child-rearing practices: any future
aggression by Andrew will be seen as a consequence of her own improper behaviour.
The experience is one of an internal battle which is overwhelming. Importantly, Marilyn
seems unable to construct alternative meanings to explain what is going on; for
example, that feeling angry and frustrated with one’s children is not uncommon and that
parents can and do smack their children with ensuing feelings of regret. In part, this
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494 Virginia Eatough and Jonathan Smith

might be because Marilyn has no supportive network to draw on when the pressures of
caring for a young child prove too much:
I’m just a Billy no mates. I’ve got no friends, I’ve got nobody to share owt with. Erm, and
your mind does turn to mush when you’re in the house all the time with a three year old not
having an adult conversation.
Marilyn’s isolation makes it difficult for her to distinguish between the normal and
expected frustrations experienced when bringing up children and her enduring and
pervasive anger.
Andrew’s presence has brought about a shift in the expression of anger. There is
clear evidence of control in her relationship with Andrew as well as an ability to avoid or
withdraw from conflict with John. Also, Marilyn shows an awareness that this is a
reasonable way to be when one has a child. At the same time, however, there has been
no resolution of Marilyn’s anger. Her anger is now mostly contained and suppressed,
bringing about feelings of inner turmoil and hopelessness for Marilyn. She recognizes
this as a problem, sees the possibility that her affective response will not be controllable,
and is, as a result, seeking professional help.

Discussion
This section begins to theorize Marilyn’s felt emotion of anger drawing on ideas from
phenomenology and draws attention to how these ideas have value for psychology’s
understanding of emotion experience. In addition, it comments on how qualitative
techniques such as IPA develop rich contextual understandings of the experiential
dimension of emotion through the use of an idiographic interpretative approach.
The material presented exemplifies Marilyn’s descriptions of an intensely felt
emotion, which is depicted through images of boiling heat, rage and the colour red. She
feels her anger as transformative, bringing another person into being (a wild wild
person). The body is central to this experience. Although psychologists have always
recognized a role for the body, the focus has been neurophysiological patterns and
mechanisms that might underlie discrete emotions (see Strongman, 2003, for a review of
relevant theories and research). From this perspective, the body is merely an aroused
organism and no attention is paid to ‘the experience of the person who is that body, who
lives that body’ (Stevick, 1971, p. 134).
In contrast, a phenomenological perspective explicitly addresses this dimension,
proposing that bodily change is a key aspect of what anger feels like; being angry is an
experience which is lived through the body. Van Manen (1998) points to how sickness,
unlike physical health draws attention to our bodies, reminding us that our body is
an integral aspect of being-in-the-world. The same is true of emotion experience.
Merleau-Ponty (1945/2004) proposed that the body is inextricably caught up with our
sense of self, our lifeworld and our relations with others: simply put, we are our bodies.
Merleau-Ponty is acknowledging Sartre’s idea that our bodies are somehow ‘everywhere
( partout)’ in our experience of the world (Moran, 2000, p. 423). We propose that
psychology could benefit from thinking in terms of the lived and existential body, or the
body-subject (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2004). For, as Merleau-Ponty said, it is not possible for
the body to be an object because an object is something that can be moved away, and we
can never be absent from our bodies. This notion of the body-subject is important because
it suggests a body that both perceives and knows: ‘The body discloses the world for us in a
certain way. It is the transcendental condition for the possibility of experiencing objects at
all, our means of communication with the world’ (Moran, 2000, p. 425).
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Anger, feelings, and interpretative phenomenological analysis 495

These ideas assert the primacy of one’s own body (le corps proper) in establishing
the meaning of our emotions and conveying this meaning to others. This is a felt
meaning which ‘does not come to you in the form of thoughts or words or other
separate units, but as a single (often puzzling and very complex) bodily feeling’
(Gendlin, 1962/1987, pp. 32–33), and is a pre-reflective engagement with the objects
and events given to us in our world.
That the felt meaning of Marilyn’s anger was complex and often mystifying is
evidenced in her attempts to convey what the experience actually felt like; her
descriptions aimed to transform and make explicit somehow her lived embodied
experience of being angry. Although inevitably her descriptions fail to capture entirely
the experience, they signal a need to think seriously about how to incorporate felt
meaning into psychological theories of emotion. Psychophysiological studies show that
the rise of angry feelings coexists with sympathetic excitatory elevations in the
autonomic nervous system. The size of any changes influences anger intensity and the
propensity to aggress (Averill, 1982; Zillmann, 1988). Marilyn’s descriptions go some
way to illustrating how she experiences those physiological changes. The empirical
problem is how better to grasp the ways in which the body reveals the world to us.
For Marilyn, crying was an integral element of the anger experience. Crying is a potent
form of emotional expression and it is surprising that adult crying has received little
attention from psychologists (Vingerhoets, Cornelius, Van Heck, & Becht, 2000). A
common theme throughout the extant literature is that for women, crying is an
expression of helplessness and powerlessness (Bindra, 1972; Frijda, 1986; Vingerhoets &
Scheirs, 2000; Williams & Morris, 1996). Miceli and Castelfranchi (2003) have proposed
that despite the multidetermined nature of crying and the varied contexts in which it
takes place, it can be explained by the principle of perceived helplessness. Crying is:
Either a consequence of one’s frustration for being unable to express one’s anger, or it is a
form of protest for being unjustly wronged, the typical protest of the helpless, who feel
unable to restore justice in some way. In both cases, the core component of perceived
helplessness is at stake. (p. 253)
This is similar to Stevick’s (1971) proposal derived from her empirical existential
phenomenological analysis in which she says anger arises when the individual
experiences inability in a situation. She conceptualizes her participants’ experiences thus:
Anger is the pre-reflective experience of being made unable by an other who prevents us,
and it is the counteraction of this sense of inability by an affective transformation of the
other and of the relationship with the other. (p. 144)
Stevick successfully draws attention to how this inability is both relational and
transformative. Emotions are always interpersonal and contextual, they are a way of
being-in-the-world and, as Sartre (1994) says, they transform that world. Although the
utility of notions of inability, perceived helplessness and transformation require more
empirical work, they resonate with Marilyn’s own words. Qualitative work of a
phenomenological persuasion has much to offer in determining the interpretive power
of such ideas.
Marilyn’s anger and aggression are directed towards those she is closest to, and her
accounts suggest that her anger expression is deeply influenced by shifts in the
relational field. For example, Marilyn’s anger experiences have changed since the birth
of Andrew. She is now more likely to exercise restraint and show her anger by crying and
withdrawing from the situation. These different ways of bringing anger in or keeping
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496 Virginia Eatough and Jonathan Smith

anger out reflect complex relational patters. Jack (2001) identified six ways in which
women either express or suppress their anger. According to her typology, Marilyn’s
strategies are not constructive: either she expresses her anger aggressively, which leads
to negative self-feelings and evaluations, or she attempts to silence it rather than
thinking of ways to express it constructively. These differential ways of expressing anger
are theoretically important for what they have to say about how emotional episodes are
inextricably connected to a person’s whole life, past, present and future.
The dynamic and relational nature of Marilyn’s anger is illuminated in this study in
ways not possible with standard questionnaire measures. Some scales address context
through the use of items designed to measure responses to anger provoking situations.
Typical scenarios include asking participants to rate how angry they would be in
response to statements like ‘someone ripping off your automobile antenna’ (Novaco,
1975) or ‘you have just found out someone has told lies about you’ (Knight, Ross,
Collins, & Parmenter, 1985). Responses to these hypothetical scenarios are quantified by
using Likert scales, and statistical analysis of the data is used to generate predictive
indices of actual behaviour. However, in psychometric investigations it is not possible to
tap into the complexity and subtlety of what we call upon in our everyday knowing in
order to make sense of our emotion experiences. In contrast, the detailed and inductive
approach of IPA, with its roots in phenomenology and hermeneutic inquiry, allows the
researcher to build up a detailed picture of the subjective felt experience of anger as it is
embedded in the narrative of the individual lifeworld.

Conclusions
We hope that we have managed to convey how an idiographic approach illuminates felt
emotion as it is experienced within the individual lifeworld. Emotion experience is an
important aspect of emotion requiring further investigation. We suggest that qualitative
approaches such as IPA can make a valuable contribution to furthering our
understanding of this ‘what it is like’ component.

Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the helpful comments of the editor and two anonymous reviewers.

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Received 4 October 2005; revised version received 9 December 2005