When psychology did not yet exist as a separate science, so before the mid-19th century, it was part of philosophy and especially philosophers wrote about psychological themes. So, if you didn’t want to follow the commonsense psychological advices of your family and friends or other persons you trusted, or if you didn’t trust your own commonsense views, you tried to find out what philosophers had written about your problem or how philosophers could provide an answer to your question. So you turned to Aristotle, or Spinoza or to another thinker. Also Montaigne wrote sometimes about philosophical themes, for example in essay 4 of Book I of his Essays: “How the soul expends its passions upon false objects, when the true are missed”. Here, Montaigne tells us that people who are frustrated often direct themselves to the wrong object in order to take it out; especially, when there is no other way or no decent way to do something about your frustration. For instance, Montaigne tells us that “a gentleman of [his] country] marvellously tormented with the gout … [said] in the extremity of his [pains] he must needs have something to quarrel with, and that railing at and cursing, one while the Bologna sausages, and another the dried tongues and the hams, was some mitigation to his pain.”
Some other examples mentioned by Montaigne: Pulling your hair out of sorrow. Or the Persian King Xerxes who whipped the Hellespont because a gale had destroyed the bridges he was building. Or “Caligula demolished a very beautiful palace for the pleasure his mother had once enjoyed there.” Some wanted to punish even God or their gods, because they hadn’t helped them or had obstructed their plans.
I think it is a kind of behaviour that most of us know or even have performed themselves. You give a kick against the door or other object, because you are frustrated, although these objects don’t have any relationship with your frustration (and if they would have, even then they couldn’t help, for objects have no will). Others become aggressive, for instance football supporters, because their club has lost a match. Examples abound, and you’ll certainly find more, either because you sometimes behaved so, or because you have seen others doing so or have heard of it.
At first glance, it seems that Montaigne mocks this kind of behaviour, and some Montaigne interpreters explain the essay this way. Doesn’t Montaigne mention such behaviour “folly”? However, a closer reading of the essay shows a deep psychological insight into the matter. For Montaigne doesn’t only ridicule the behaviour, but he explains also its causes: “So it seems that the soul, being transported and discomposed, turns its violence upon itself, if not supplied with something to oppose it, and therefore always requires an object at which to aim, and whereon to act.” And if we cannot find an object that fits the frustration, we look for something else, even if it has nothing to do with the frustration. “And we see that the soul, in its passions, inclines rather to deceive itself, by creating a false and fantastical subject, even contrary to its own belief, than not to have something to work upon.”
This is a deep insight, for once we know the causes of our frustrated and irrational behaviour, we can try to do something about it and to look for a reasonable alternative or to learn to behave ourselves. And that’s what modern psychologists do. On the internet, for instance, you can find many tips how to control your frustration and how to lead it in a positive direction. To give your soul an object, in Montaigne’s terms. Montaigne himself did not do so, but at the end of the essay, he gives us the good advice to restrain ourselves, for it has no sense to let yourself go. Or address your frustration to yourself: “We can never enough decry the disorderly sallies of our minds.” But isn’t this what we do, when we pull our hair out of sorrow?
