Anger in the Therapeutic Space: Healing through the Attitude of Equanimity

In the consulting room, the existence of anger-a perfectly normal human emotion-is less a concern than our relationship to it, whether our own or our patients'. The ways we frame difficult emotions like anger and how we encourage our patients to hold them are crucial to the task of psychological healing. Offered here are some reflections, situated at the crossroads of psychodynamic theory and Buddhist thought, on how such healing may be rooted in the attitude of equanimity.