‘Aggression’ at Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life, Page 4

By far the most limiting aspect of traditional approaches to understanding the most character-disturbed individuals among us is that purely behavioral descriptions don’t capture the essence of what is unhealthy and problematic in them.

Aggressive personalities are fundamentally at war with anything that stands in the way of their unrestrained pursuit of their desires.

Splitting refers to the unconscious failure to integrate aspects of self or others into a unified whole. The age old conscious and deliberate game of “dividing and conquering” is not the same as splitting.

An offense involves fighting hard enough to secure a goal and remove obstacles to that goal. A defense involves expending just enough energy to ward off an attack or prevent injury.

Often when someone says that another person is being “passive-aggressive,” they really mean something else. Let’s clarify just what passive-aggression is — and what it isn’t — with the help of a framework for understanding human aggression in general.