According to official figures, reconviction rates for young offenders have fallen by a fifth since 1997. This, if true, is good news, although youth crime itself would have to fall by at least 95 per cent before life in British inner cities became remotely bearable. A certain scepticism before rejoicing would in any case be wise: anyone who has any acquaintance with the figure-massaging propensities of modern government will continue to lock his house and venture out at night with due caution.

One of the ways by which youth crime has been reduced, according to officialdom, is a curious quasi-treatment known as anger management. By this means youths are trained to contain their impulsive actions when they feel anger welling up within them and to count to ten instead of lashing out, as was their pre-treatment custom.

Here, once again, we see the triumph of the Therapeutic State. Come unto me, says the State, and I will make you whole. The corollary of this, of course, is that if I am not made whole, if on the contrary I continue to shout and stamp my feet and slap my girlfriend, the fault is not mine but the State’s, for not having provided me with the assistance I need. “I’ve tried to get the help,” say many a recidivist, “but no one’s listening.” For every behavioural problem, they believe (or at least pretend to believe) that there is an equal and opposite therapy: until then, they are justified in continuing to do whatever it is that brings them into conflict with the law. Indeed, they can continue to do so with a sense of moral superiority to the rest of society and to the law itself: for they have been deprived by society of that to which they are entitled, namely help. They are angry that they have had no anger management, or no help for their addiction to stealing cars.

This perfectly dovetails with both the intellectual outlook and material interests of the apparatchiks of therapy, an ever growing class that absorbs so many of the products of our establishments of tertiary education. If only there were enough counsellors of every kind, social problems would disappear as snow in sunshine. The ideal of the Therapeutic State is for half the population to be in permanent counselling with the other half. Not for nothing are those who attend social workers, counsellors and psychiatrists called clients, for the Therapeutic State is one in which political “clientism” flourishes. The last thing any bureaucracy wants is a population that does not demand it.

Anger management treats the normal, and occasionally necessary, human emotion as a disease. On this view, losing one’s temper is a kind of epileptic fit requiring appropriate treatment. When violent people say that they “just went into one” or “just lost it” they are taken to be expressing a truth, although it is odd how few people go into one or lose it when the circumstances are not auspicious, for example in the presence of people bigger, stronger and more violent than themselves.

Oddly enough, the more therapists there are, the more people are discovered to need therapy to solve the problems of daily living. This is an instance of the law first enunciated by my psychiatrist colleague, Dr Colin Brewer: misery increases to meet the means available for its alleviation. The alleviation, is of course, bogus.

It is certainly true, however, that anger and its uninhibited expression in our society has become a problem. You can see it written on the faces of people in the street. So many of them are obviously on a hair-trigger, ready to explode into wrath at the slightest pretext. Which of us has not experienced the almost murderous rage of someone given the most minuscule reason for offence?

Why should this be, at a time of comparative material prosperity when people have more abundant lives than ever before? What are they angry about?

In the first place, certain modern methods of child rearing appear to promote bad temper and its expression. Many parents come to me in a state of genuine puzzlement over the disastrous and horrible way that their children have turned out. “We gave them everything,” they say.

When I ask them what they mean by everything, they invariably reply television in the bedroom, the latest trainers and so forth. In other words, their child- rearing is a dialectic between neglect and over-indulgence, both of which are conducive to rage. Neglect engenders an insensate desire to be noticed by others, manifested by a morbid hyper-sensitivity to perceived slights, while material over-indulgence results in rage on the discovery that some material delights or possessions must remain beyond reach. The child who has been given everything he desires because everything he desires is within reach becomes an angry, fractious adult when he discovers that there is much he will never have.

As if this were not enough, we have become convinced of the plenitude and equality of our own rights. When we feel that something to which we have a right has been denied us, we swiftly grow furious: for the violation of a right is a grievous, if metaphysical, personal injury.

Let me give a practical example. Patients have been told that they have a right to treatment, and may even decide on the treatment themselves. Therefore, if a doctor has the temerity to deny them what they want, on the grounds that what they want is medically inadvisable, he is believed to be violating their rights and an ugly scene often ensues, sometimes ending in violence. If Descartes were alive today, he would write: “I want, therefore I have a right.”

But the world remains as refractory to our desires as ever. What has changed is our ability to accept and tolerate this ineluctable condition of human existence. We do not need more anger management: we need to say no to our children as a matter of principle and abandon the notion of rights, our own included. Every time I hear someone say “It’s my right”, well, I grow angry.

The author is a prison doctor

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