Josh Cohen

Anger is all around us, from divisive social media arguments and heightened political divides to road rage and personal spats; from Black Lives Matter and climate justice movements to Trump, incels and white supremacists. When it materialises, it seems to cry out for recognition and response. It affects our bodies and can transition into violence. It can be inherited through the generations; it can manifest in criminal acts. What should we do with it, and can it ever be put to good use? Drawing on case studies of patients, developments in neuropsychology, literature, philosophy and recent political events, acclaimed author and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen identifies the different forms of anger, including the most untrammelled and elemental fury, the more cynical anger that works towards political unrest, and the questioning anger of political protest. Rather than an emotion to ignore, he argues that anger is a primary human feeling. It maps itself onto every aspect of our intimate lives while politically and culturally shaping our world. In a time of intense dissatisfactions and spiralling divisions, and with anger a dominating force, All the Rage offers a new and original understanding of anger, so we may better handle the rage within us.

'We tell ourselves stories in order to live' Joan Didion From the truths and lies we tell about ourselves to the resonant creations of fiction, stories give shape and meaning to all our lives. Both a practicing psychoanalyst and a professor of literature, Josh Cohen has long been taken with the mutual echoes between the life struggles of the consulting room and the dramas of the novel. So what might the most memorable characters in literature tell us about how to live meaningfully? In How to Live. What to Do, Cohen plots a course through the various stages of our lives, discovering in each the surprising and profound insights literature has to offer. Beginning with the playful mindset of Wonderland's Alice, we discover the resilience of Jane Eyre, the rebellious rage of Baldwin's Johnny Grimes and the catastrophic ambitions of Jay Gatsby, the turbulence of first love for Sally Rooney's Frances, the sorrows of marriage for Middlemarch's Dorothea Brooke, and the regrets and comforts of middle age for Rabbit Angstrom.

'To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world.' Oscar Wilde More than ever before, we live in a culture that excoriates inactivity and demonizes idleness. Work, connectivity and a constant flow of information are the cultural norms, and a permanent busyness pervades even our quietest moments. Little wonder so many of us are burning out. In a culture that tacitly coerces us into blind activity, the art of doing nothing is disappearing. Inactivity can induce lethargy and indifference, but is also a condition of imaginative freedom and creativity. Psychoanalyst Josh Cohen explores the paradoxical pleasures of inactivity, and considers four faces of inertia - the burnout, the slob, the daydreamer and the slacker. Drawing on his personal experiences and on stories from his consulting room, while punctuating his discussions with portraits of figures associated with the different forms of inactivity - Andy Warhol, Orson Welles, Emily Dickinson and David Foster Wallace - Cohen gets to the heart of the apathy so many of us feel when faced with the demands of contemporary life, and asks how we might live a different and more fulfilled existence.