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Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice (2006), 79, 115–135
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I feel like a scrambled egg in my head:

An idiographic case study of meaning
making and anger using interpretative
phenomenological analysis
Virginia Eatough* and Jonathan A. Smith

School of Psychology, Birkbeck University of London, UK
What does it feel like when one’s meaning making is impoverished and threatens to
break down? The aim of this study is to show how meaning making is achieved in the
context of one’s life and how this achievement is often a struggle for the individual.
The study reports data from semi-structured interviews with a female participant,
which was analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). This paper
examines how cultural discourses and conventions are experienced and given
meaning by the individual. First, the analysis demonstrates how dominant discourses
are used to explain anger and aggression. These include hormones, alcohol, and the
influence of past relationships on present action. Second, it examines how the
participant’s meaning making is often ambiguous and confused, and how she variously
accepts and challenges available meanings. Finally, the analysis demonstrates how
meaning making can break down and the consequences of this for the individual’s
sense of self.
This paper considers what it feels like when explanations for one’s anger and its
behavioural expression begin to break down. The paper aims to illustrate the
experience of meaning making and how such meaning making can be ambiguous,
ambivalent, and confused. In addition, we will argue that sense making is always both an
individual and social product (Riessman, 1992). Although, inevitably, cultural discourses
inform individual meaning making, this process also involves individual re-experiencing
and re-interpreting of the events in one’s life. This paper demonstrates this dual
enterprise by reporting on an interpretative analysis of interviews with one female
participant.
Few emotion theorists would doubt that a relationship exists between cognition
and emotion and many ‘non-cognitive’ theories incorporate some sort of cognitive
*Correspondence should be addressed to Dr Virginia Eatough, School of Psychology, Birkbeck University of London, Malet
Street, London WCIE 7HX (e-mail: v.eatough@bbk.ac.uk).
DOI:10.1348/147608305X41100
116 Virginia Eatough and Jonathan A. Smith
component (Strongman, 2003). Explicitly cognitive theories range from simple

information-processing approaches (e.g. Leventhal, 1974; Siminov, 1970) and network
theories of affect (e.g. Bower, 1981) to modular systems of human cognitive
functioning (e.g. Oatley & Johnson-Laird, 1987) and those which give the concept of
appraisal centre place (e.g. Ellsworth, 1991; Frijda, 1993; Lazarus, 1991; Smith &
Lazarus, 1993).
Much of the important social psychological research on cognition and emotion has
been concerned with appraisal and attribution. Schachter’s (1964, 1970) two-factor
theory of emotion is a cognitive-arousal theory, which proposes that ‘an emotional state
may be considered a function of a state of physiological arousal and of a cognition
appropriate to this state of arousal.’ (Schachter, 1964, p. 51). Importantly, according to
the theory, individuals interpret physiological arousal in light of the circumstances that
they believe brought it about. For example, in a romantic context, a pounding heart and
trembling hands is interpreted as passionate love (Dutton & Aron, 1974, 1989). In the
present context, Schachter’s theory is discussed largely in terms of the ingenious
experiments devised to test it and their heuristic value (Strongman, 1996). However, it
remains important because it draws attention to the importance of cognitive features of
emotion.
Weiner’s attributional theory of emotion (Weiner 1985, 1986) proposed that
emotions are the outcome of a temporal sequence of different cognitive processes.
In the first instance, individuals evaluate the success or failure of an outcome. Second, if
the outcome is evaluated negatively, then a cause is looked for. The final step involves
classifying the cause according to three attributional dimensions: causal locus (is the
cause dispositional or situational?), stability (is the cause transitory or constant?), and,
finally, controllability (is the cause under volitional control?). There is evidence that
specific emotions are associated with these categorical and dimensional attributions.
For example, internal locus and controllability have been related to guilt, whereas
controllability and external locus have been related to anger (Neumann, 2000; Weiner,
1985). However, causal attribution models are normative in that they state ideal
positions of what people ought to do rather than what people actually do when they
think and explain their emotions (Fiske, 2004). Such models have a restricted notion of
‘explanation’ (Harré, 1981; Shotter, 1981), and what people actually do is typically
constructed as deviations and biases.
More recently, the claim that attributions exert a causal effect on emotions has been
challenged by appraisal theorists (Smith, Haynes, Lazarus, & Pope, 1993; Lazarus and
Smith, 1988). They argue that attribution is a particular form of knowledge, which
assists the appraisal process by making inferences about the perceived causes of an
event. Causal attributions are not sufficient to bring an emotion into being. On the
contrary, the ‘facts’ of an event must be appraised and evaluated for emotion to arise.
From this perspective, emotions are a consequence of evaluations of the personal
significance of events and objects and their impact on well-being (Arnold, 1960;
Ellsworth & Smith, 1988; Lazarus, 1991; Roseman, 1991).
The concept of appraisal is a powerful one in that it has intuitive plausibility
(Parkinson, 1997). A large part of our emotional experience is taken up with either good
or bad feelings about the events in our lives. We are emotional when we attach personal
significance to our lived experiences. Appraisal is the psychological term for these
evaluations and is typically understood as a distinct stage in an information-processing
sequence, which culminates in the emotional reaction (Parkinson, 1997). However,
Meaning making and anger 117
empirical evidence for a simple causal relationship between appraisal and emotion is
weak (see Parkinson, 1997; Parkinson & Manstead, 1992 for detailed discussion of the
appraisal-emotion connection). Arguably, appraisals are more likely to be constitutive
rather than determinative aspects of emotional experience. Emotions do not follow
appraisal in an uncomplicated causal sequence; instead, they are processes that
interrelate and intersect in a dynamic fashion.
From the perspective of this paper, our concern is that the interpreting meaning
making person is reduced to the internal cognitive activity of hypothesized causal
relationships. This concern is also expressed by some emotion theorists and discursive
psychologists. For example, Parkinson and Manstead (1992) suggest that emotional
experience is a consequence of our social interactions with other people, our own and
other bodies, our physical environment, as well as cognitive evaluation processes.
Moreover, emotional events have a temporal dimension and unfold over time. These
features are not well captured in vignette studies, which are the usual method for
investigating appraisals (Levine, 1996) and rely on simulation or directed imagery tasks
(e.g. Roseman, 1991; Smith & Lazarus, 1993). The study reported here emphasises how
individuals talk and make sense of their emotions and of being emotional in the very
particular context of their unfolding lives.
The development of discursive psychology and discourse analysis has successfully
drawn attention to the limitations of social cognition approaches for understanding
how people explain, attribute causes, and impose meaning on their lived
experiences. Initial concerns stressed the neglect of the social and discursive
dimensions of peoples’ explanations and the over emphasis on internal cognitive
structures and processes. (Harré, 1981; Shotter, 1981). More recently, discursive
psychologists have focused their attention on the performative aspects of talk with its
various accounting devices, and how what people do in their talk is best seen as
situated action (Billig, 1987; Edwards & Potter, 1992). For example, when Helen tells
her sister she is angry with her partner and why, she is actively constructing a
particular version of events, aiming to justify her position and counter alternative
interpretations. Her construction is not an individual cognitive activity but an account
in the making, dependent on dynamic practices of interaction (Potter, 1996). From
this perspective, accounts are a product of, and are constrained by, social and
cultural conventions. Thus, emotion becomes a ‘discursive practice’, which ‘gets its
meaning and force from its location and performance in the public realm of
discourse’ (Abu-Lughod & Lutz, 1990, p. 10).
Thus, there is nothing qualitatively different about emotional experience. People
‘do’ emotion in just the same way they ‘do’ anything else. They give emotional
performances that tell us not about their emotional experience, but about the discursive
skills and rules of emotion that they have acquired through language. This ‘strong’ social
constructionist understanding of emotion can be seen in the discourse analytic work of
Edwards (1999), which focuses on what people can achieve through their narrative,
metaphorical, and rhetorical constructions of emotional events in their lives.
For Edwards, when we relate our emotion stories, we do so by utilizing rhetorically
based discursive oppositions or contrasts in order to achieve particular meanings and
effects. He demonstrates these rhetorical contrasts at work through the analysis of
relationship counselling sessions in which couples talk about emotion events in their
lives. Oppositions include emotions as event-driven versus dispositional, as rational
versus irrational, as dispositional versus temporary states, and so on. The main function
of these oppositions is to manage accountability and to counter alternative accounts of

events.
Although we agree broadly with discourse analytic attempts to focus on the action-
oriented nature of talk, and to examine how participant responses are inevitably
constrained by shared social and cultural discourses, we argue that this represents only a
partial account of what people are doing when they recount their life stories. Individuals
do argue, justify, and excuse when they narrate personal events, but they also imbue
these events with meaning so that they come to form part of their past, present, and
future lived experiences. The events in one’s life are important because they have
personal relevance and an ongoing significance for the individual concerned.
As Rosenwald succinctly puts it, narratives ‘are both about life and part of it. This
double relevance gives them their motivational and cognitive power to transform lives –
their formative potential’ (Rosenwald, 1992, p. 271).
Discursive psychology’s focus on how individuals ‘do emotion’ rather than on
how individuals ‘be emotional’ means that the lived experience of the individual
becomes nothing more than social activity. Missing from such analytic accounts are
the private, psychologically forceful, rich, and often indefinable aspects of emotional
life. In sum, we are proposing a hermeneutic approach similar to that outlined by
Bruner (1990) who attempted to establish meaning as the central concept for
psychology.
The data presented here forms part of a larger data set from a single case study.
The method is idiographic because it emphasizes the importance of the individual as
a unit of analysis (Smith, Harré, & Van Langenhove, 1995). An idiographic approach is
committed to the detailed examination of a particular phenomenon (anger) as it is
experienced and given meaning in the life-world of a particular person. The
interviews were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA; Smith,
1995; Smith & Osborn, 2003). IPA is particularly well suited to the idiographic
approach as it enables fine-grained and contextual analyses of the phenomenon under
investigation.
First, in accord with hermeneutic inquiry, IPA recognizes that the social worlds of
individuals are shaped by social processes and cultural and linguistic practices, but
asserts that these worlds cannot be reduced to them (Kögler, 1996; Martin &
Sugarman, 1999; Addison & Packer, 1989; Smith, 1996). Second, IPA investigates the
life-world of the individual, a concept that is fundamental to existential
phenomenology, concerned with both the qualities and characteristics of the
individual life, as well as its universal features of subjective embodiment, inter-
subjectivity, temporality, spatiality, personal project, and discursiveness (Ashworth,
2003). Third, IPA acknowledges that it is not possible to access an individual’s life-
world directly because there is no clear and unmediated window into that life.
Investigating how events and objects are experienced and given meaning requires
interpretative activity on the part of the researcher, which Smith and Osborn (2003)
describe as a dual process where ‘the participants are trying to make sense of their
world; the researcher is trying to make sense of the participants trying to make sense
of their world’ (p. 51). Different levels of interpretation are possible; the analyst
might move from close textual readings of the participant’s words to a more abstract
and critical understanding.
IPA shares some common ground with Foucauldian discourse analysis, which
examines how the people’s worlds are discursively constructed and how these are
implicated in the experiences of the individual. However, IPA gives a central place to
experience while acknowledging the multiple influences on it; its historical and
cultural situatedness including language and social norms and practices. For example,
it recognizes that an interview is a localized interaction that tells us about how a
person talks about a particular experience. However, IPA claims that this contingent
contextual analysis is only a partial account of what is happening. Rather, IPA posits
an ongoing significance and degree of stability between accounts, thoughts, and
actions, as well as across interactions. People may want to achieve a whole host of
things with their talk, such as saving face, persuading, and rationalizing, but there is
almost always more at stake, which transcends the specific local interaction. Among
other things, we argue that our narratives are also concerned with human potential
and development, with making our lives by connecting the past with the present and
future.
Method
Participant
The participant is referred to throughout as Marilyn. At the time of the study, Marilyn
was 30 years old and living with her partner John and their son Andrew in a council
house in an inner city area of the Midlands UK. The area is categorized as extreme in
terms of social need and has correspondingly high levels of crime. Marilyn left school at
16 years of age and has worked in a variety of unskilled jobs. Since having Andrew, she
has not worked outside of the home. All names have been changed to safeguard
confidentiality.
Data collection
Marilyn responded to a mail drop in her area asking for volunteers to participate in a
study on how women experience and resolve conflict in their lives. After an initial
telephone conversation, the first author met Marilyn at her home to discuss
participation in the study. This first meeting was an attempt to make Marilyn feel as
relaxed and informed as possible by detailing what the study would involve, and to
address any concerns she might have. This can be referred to as attempting to achieving
symmetry between the researcher and participant (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000).
Subsequently, an interview schedule was developed and two semi-structured interviews
were carried out over a period of 3 weeks, which resulted in 4 hours of data.
The interviews were conducted by the first author in Marilyn’s home and were recorded
onto a mini disk recorder. There were specific issues we were hoping to address but the
primary aim was for Marilyn to tell her story and not to simply be a respondent. When
people tell the stories of their lives, they do so in particular ways. They refer to actual
concrete events in space and time and they suffuse these events with meaning and
significance.
The aim was to capture the richness and complexity of Marilyn’s meaning making by
being an active listener and by allowing the interview to progress down avenues she
opened up rather than those dictated by the schedule. At the same time, we recognize
that individuals tell their stories with varying degrees of ease, not least because they do
not view them as necessarily interesting to an outsider. Thus, the first question we asked
Marilyn was to tell the story of her life, from as far back as she could remember. It was
hoped that by doing this, Marilyn would have a sense of the value and intrinsic worth of
what she had to say regarding her lived experiences of anger and interpersonal conflict.
The interview data was transcribed in full.
Analysis
IPA is not a prescriptive approach; rather, it provides a set of flexible guidelines which
can be adapted by individual researchers in light of their research aims (Smith, Jarman, &
Osborn, 1999; Smith & Dunworth, 2003; Smith & Osborn, 2003. The procedure
adopted in this study involved treating the interviews as one set of data. The stages used
throughout the analysis were as follows: the transcript was read several times and the
left hand margin used to make notes on anything that appeared significant and of
interest. With each reading, the researcher should expect to feel more ‘wrapped up’ in
the data, becoming more responsive to what is being said. The second stage involved
returning to the transcript afresh and using the right hand margin to transform initial
notes and ideas into more specific themes or phrases, calling upon psychological
concepts and abstractions. Caution is essential at this point so that the connection
between the participant’s own words and the researcher’s interpretations is not lost.
These early stages of analysis require the researcher to be thorough and painstaking.
The third stage consists of further reducing the data by establishing connections
between the preliminary themes and clustering them appropriately. These clusters are
given a descriptive label (higher order theme title) which conveys the conceptual nature
of the themes therein. Smith and Osborn (2003) suggest that researchers ‘imagine a
magnet with some of the themes pulling others in and helping to make sense of
them’ (p. 71).
Finally, a table is produced that shows each higher order theme and the subthemes
that comprise it. A brief illustrative data extract is presented alongside each theme. For
the researcher, this table is the outcome of an iterative process in which she/he has
moved back and forth between the various analytic stages ensuring that the integrity of
what the participant said has been preserved as far as possible. If the researcher has
been successful, then it should be possible for someone else to track the analytic
journey from the raw data through to the end table. The second author carried out this
‘independent audit’ (Smith, 1996). Once some measure of gestalt (Smith, 2004) has
been reached, a narrative account of the interplay between the interpretative activity of
the researcher and the participant’s account of her experience (in her own words) was
produced. Analysis continues into this formal process of writing up. The researcher
should aim to provide a close textual reading of the participant’s account, moving
between description and different levels of interpretation, clearly differentiating
between them at all times. Enough data should be presented for the reader to assess the
usefulness of the interpretations.
Analysis of the data established three higher order themes that encapsulate Marilyn’s
lived experiences of anger and conflict. This paper reports on one of these, and is
described as a meaning-making theme. It examines how personal and cultural
frameworks of meaning mesh with each other and are lived and experienced by the
individual person. Marilyn’s own words best convey what this experience is like for her:
I feel like a scrambled egg in my head. The other higher order themes will be reported
elsewhere (Eatough & Smith, in press).
Ethics
The following ethical guidelines were applied: informed consent, right to privacy and
anonymity, protection from harm, and sensitivity and duty of care. The participant
was given full and complete information about the research, and it was made clear
that she had the right to withdraw at any time, and request the interviews to be
destroyed. Throughout the interviews, it was emphasized that questions did not have
to be answered, and it was clearly stated that in the event of any distress, the
interview would be stopped or the tape-recorder turned off. A list of independent
counsellors was brought to each interview. The data collection process was guided
by Stake’s statement that ‘qualitative researchers are guests in the private spaces of
the world. Their manners should be good and their code of ethics strict’ (Stake, 2000,
p. 447).
Results
Three interrelated aspects of this sense-making theme are presented. First, the analysis
shows how Marilyn invokes cultural frameworks of meaning to explain her anger
and aggressive behaviour. The first of these frameworks draws heavily on biological
discourses; namely, the influence of hormones and alcohol. The analysis demonstrates
how Marilyn’s attempts to produce a strong and convincing account of these influences
are undermined by alternative explanations. These alternative explanations include (a)
the social and material conditions of her life and (b) counselling sessions that promote
the influence of past relationships on present action. Second, we examine how these
competing explanations render Marilyn’s sense making ambiguous and confused, and
how she variously accepts and challenges the meanings available to her. Finally, we
demonstrate how Marilyn’s meaning making breaks down and the consequences of this
for her sense of self.
‘That’s all hormones’

Drawing on medicalized discourses that explain behaviour as a consequence of
hormones is a culturally powerful way of making sense of one’s experiences.
Attributing aggressive and violent behaviour to an imbalance in hormones implies a
faulty biology and ignores how the individual’s material, social, and cultural
environment also shapes who we are, how we deal with emotional pain, and how we
manage difficulties in life. A narrative of hormonal influence weaves a potent thread
throughout Marilyn’s story. In this first extract, Marilyn makes an explicit connection
between her hormones and her aggressive behaviour. At the time, she was almost 17
years of age, very much wanted a baby, and her aggression was directed at both her
partner at that time and herself:
I started off with just you know pushing him or hitting him type thing but then it was, it was
sort of got worse where I’d start hurting myself as well, like throwing my arms at a mirror
and cutting, cutting you know just self-mutilation but not to harm myself : : : Looking back
now it was a cry for help but I mean nobody answered (laughs) basically. And erm I suffered
really badly from depression where I had to go on medication. As well as that I had a fertility
problem where I had polycystic ovaries : : : It’s awful but I mean that’s all hormones as well
which explains away a lot of my moods and aggression and that. But I mean I don’t know
whether it I mean I have got a lot of hang ups about my family but I think a lot of it is
hormonal my aggression and things like that.
This data extract reveals that in addition to aggressing towards her partner, Marilyn
engaged in deliberate self-harming behaviour. For Marilyn, the phenomenological
experience of this narrative episode is one of escalation. She moves from relatively
harmless acts of physical aggression to those with potentially dangerous and damaging
consequences with herself becoming the target. What is interesting here is how
Marilyn’s hormonal narrative develops throughout our conversation and gains ground as
an explanation. In the first instance, Marilyn describes her aggression as a cry for help,
which went unanswered. This is possibly a relatively new interpretation and is a
consequence of the counselling. Next, Marilyn introduces her depression and fertility
condition, and the latter sets the scene for Marilyn to make the link between her
aggression and hormones. The statement ‘that’s all hormones’ illustrates how Marilyn
employs the condition of polycystic ovary syndrome to highlight the pervasive control
of hormones over her physical body and possibly her mental state. In the extract, she
moves towards stating a blanket, categorical relationship between her hormones and
her behaviour. The power of this statement lies in its ability to negate alternative
understandings for the anger and aggression events in Marilyn’s life and seems to serve
as a linguistic climax for this extract.
However, there is evidence that she doubts the robustness of her hormonal
explanation when she says ‘but I mean I don’t know whether it I mean I have got a lot of
hang ups about my family but I think a lot of it is hormonal my aggression and things like
that’. The mention of family difficulties is introduced then quickly dismissed. Our
tentative suggestion is that at the time of the interviews, Marilyn was finding it too
painful to examine the ‘hang ups’ she had concerning her family. She recalls a childhood
in which she felt neglected and unloved:
I: You’ve never talked them [her feelings] over with your mum?
M: No, no never, never told her how I feel ever. She just wouldn’t understand at all she
doesn’t, I don’t think she’d listen to me, she’d probably hear the words but not what I’m
saying. Not a very caring mother, well not to me she wasn’t. (Text in brackets indicates
explanatory material added afterwards)
Further evidence for this claim can be seen in the following subthemes: I think I got
depressed and I do hate my mum but I love her (see below). Marilyn talks about being
in ‘emotional pain’ and thinking that her mother disliked her, and it is possible that she
found it easier to persist in her belief that hormones are responsible, thus smoothing out
the inconsistencies in her account. In fact, the phrase ‘explains away’ might be ironic,
reflecting an awareness on Marilyn’s part that she is invoking a ‘catch-all’ explanation
which belies the complexity of what is actually going on.
‘It was the alcohol’

In addition to inferring that the causes of her anger and aggression are hormonal,
Marilyn utilizes an equally powerful physiological discourse: alcohol. Describing an
incident involving a fight with a partner named Simon, Marilyn says:
It was the alcohol, I do remember I did feel angry, really angry, I mean raged angry but
(pause) it was more because I think being humiliated, being shown up, he made me feel
stupid in front of my friends do you know what I mean? It’s not, I didn’t actually think
well you’re going to have to pay for that but it was that sort of thing. I just don’t think I
actually thought about the emotional side of it. I just thought right you’ve shown me up,
you’re not leaving me alone. I just walked him away, tried to push him away that way but
I mean that was really weird that night because I mean like a lot of it was alcohol but I
cannot remember a lot of it. It was like a blind rage, it was really and there’s been quite a
few times that I’ve been like that without the alcohol, that I really can’t recall a lot of
what I’ve done until I’ve actually looked at the damage. And sat down afterwards and
looked at what I’ve done.
There are several points of interest in this extract. At the outset, Marilyn makes a clear
causal statement, which, by the end, is seriously weakened. First, she describes her rage
as ‘blind’ and the end state is of emerging from the fury with little or no memory and of
time being lost. Elsewhere we have reported that such intense emotion can be felt
without alcohol, something which Marilyn herself comments upon (Eatough & Smith, in
press). Second, the rage Marilyn feels appears to be fuelled less by alcohol and more by
what she experiences as public humiliation, which requires some sort of revenge. Thus,
it is not simply to do with the effects of intoxication but also to do with issues of
integrity and self worth.
Third, ‘you’re not leaving me alone’ can be viewed as a telling statement and it is
interesting to speculate on why Marilyn said this to herself. It might simply be that being
left alone would increase her mortified feelings, or that she no longer had a target for her
anger and aggression. However, since leaving home, Marilyn has always been in an
intimate relationship. Arguably, these relationships provide evidence that she is a person
who is capable of being loved and the unconscious motivation might be to avoid
(reliving) the experience of her relationship with her mother. Finally, as with the
hormonal accounts, there are cracks beginning to appear in the extract, which
undermine its strength as an account. At the end of the extract, she acknowledges a
certain culpability for her behaviour when she says ‘and looked at what I’ve done’.
There is also a recognition made in passing that the focus on alcohol allows her to
bypass other contributory factors such as feeling hurt and humiliated and how this made
her feel about her sense of self.
‘I think I got depressed’

In contrast to the simplistic causal accounts of hormones and alcohol, the next extract
gives a moving account of the distress Marilyn was experiencing and her specific set of
circumstances:
Paul was the first relationship that when I was sort of violent. Erm, I remember I was
happy at first at the beginning of the relationship and then we started living together, we
were in a grotty bedsit for a long time. He was working nights, I mean it was, I think I
got depressed. And erm I think we’d been together about a year, year and a half and we
both wanted a baby erm I remember I was having treatment at the hospital but I was
also getting more and more aggressive where I was hitting him. I mean not in the face
but in the arms and things like that. Erm I was more verbally abusive and trying to hurt
myself more than anything in that relationship where I wanted to cut myself : : : . I think
I was in you know like an emotional pain you know, like when your heart aches, I felt
heartbroken over something you know, it was probably my mum again and I thought, I
think I thought if I hurt myself it wouldn’t hurt as much, do you understand what I
mean?
Once again, a narrative of escalation is present and Marilyn’s emotional pain is felt
bodily. At first, Marilyn seems to invoke social or sociological reasons for her aggression
(e.g. living and working conditions, depression), but these are superseded by more
personal reasons. The metaphor of a broken and aching heart is a culturally powerful
one and signifies a loss of something precious, be that a person, goal, or relationship.
This is a much more multi-faceted narrative and differs from the previous ones in that
Marilyn’s almost casual observation, ‘I think it was a cry for help’ (see first extract) is
openly acknowledged to have been a time of pain and anguish. Marilyn’s loneliness
suffuses the account: Paul is physically absent a lot of the time, she is having difficulty
becoming pregnant (so is not with child), and her pain is such that she wants to hurt
herself.
Thus, in the narrative episodes presented above, there are a number of competing
explanations. Marilyn draws on the effects of hormones and alcohol as narrative
resources to make sense of her anger. These frameworks of meaning are powerful
because they satisfy the desire for a simple causal explanation and, at the same time,
remove responsibility from her. However, as we have demonstrated, the emphatic
statements ‘that’s all hormones’ and ‘it was the alcohol’ are threatened and begin to
break down as Marilyn begins to realize other ways of sense making.
It is essential that the material and social conditions that make up Marilyn’s life-
world are noted. At the time of her relationship with Paul, she was 16 years of age
and, before moving in with him, had slept for several weeks in a van outside his
house. Marilyn was not in touch with her mother (and, possibly, with none of her
family), Paul worked nights, and her material circumstances were far from ideal. In
addition, she found she was unable to conceive and she describes her state of mind
at the time as depressed.
Furthermore, it becomes clear when one looks across these extracts, how the
fractures in the narratives are a consequence of meaning making around her family and
her mother in particular. There is a move from a general explanation of a cry for help and
‘hang ups about my family’ in the first extract towards a more specific, if somewhat
hesitant, account involving her mother. The importance of the relationship with her
mother gains ground as Marilyn reiterates and re-experiences the emotional pain and
feelings of heartbreak. At the same time, this re-experiencing gives rise to feelings of
confusion and hopelessness within Marilyn. This is explored in the next section, which
highlights Marilyn’s difficulties with the breakdown of her long-standing ways of making
sense of her anger and aggression.
‘I still feel desperate’

Shortly before the interviews, Marilyn visited her doctor expressing concern that
Andrew was becoming a target of her anger and aggression. From Marilyn’s perspective,
her pervasive anger and aggression is explained through a lens of illness with symptoms
that can be treated. She had hoped to be prescribed medication but the doctor
suggested that she try counselling. This section illuminates how the counselling sessions
encourage Marilyn to participate in an alternative framework of meaning. This
therapeutic discourse involves a search for the origins of Marilyn’s emotions and
behaviour in her relationships, especially those from the past. Yet, Marilyn’s unique
lived experiences (which include the material and social context of her life) make it
difficult for her to see value in therapeutic meaning making. She is not used to
communicating how she feels through talk, not least because she does not have a
network of significant people to confide in. She describes herself as a ‘Billy no mates’
who has ‘nobody to share owt with’.
When Marilyn was asked about whether the counselling sessions were helping, it
was clear that she had very mixed feelings about their value:
I think it will long-term but I just don’t know what I’m supposed to be getting from it. You
know, I’m not, I mean yes, I’d like somebody to tell me what to do, you know, point me in
the direction but I just don’t feel I’m getting that, I’m not.
Most counselling and psychotherapeutic approaches require the client to assume an

active role in the search for answers to ‘why?’ questions. Typically, this search involves
an examination of the complicated and intricate interrelationship of past and present
experiences, with the aim of reaching some sort of resolution. In the context of
Marilyn’s life, this meant confronting and contemplating her relationship with her
mother. However, unravelling the complexities of this relationship requires Marilyn’s
active involvement, as well as access to particular skills.
We argue that Marilyn is not able to act as a full participant in this sort of therapeutic
meaning making. Typically, her meaning making relies on powerful cultural discourses
that encourage her to think about her anger and aggression as caused by hormones
and/or alcohol. Moreover, she does not have the requisite knowledge of what
participation involves; she appears unclear about what to expect and, as the extract
below suggests, she does not seem convinced of its benefits. Marilyn wants the
counsellor to tell her what to do because she is not used to interpreting her current lived
experiences through a lens of the past:
I’m not getting anything from it. I mean it’s nice to talk to somebody, I’ve got no friends,
I don’t have anybody, any friends around, and I haven’t got no family and it’s nice to talk
but I mean I don’t feel like I’m getting any better, I don’t feel any different I’m still doing
my old things, you know I still feel desperate, still feel desperate and erm I’m just not
making it.
On one level at least, the sessions begin to address her intimacy and connection needs
by providing her with the opportunity to talk to someone other than herself. However,
they are not making her feel better because they are not solving her ‘problem’. The
counselling is not bringing about a ‘miracle cure’ and is also threatening her already
tenuous explanations based on hormones and alcohol. Marilyn’s struggle for meaning is
fuelling feelings of desperation, which, as we demonstrate below, are leading her to
doubt her sanity.
In this next extract, Marilyn is discussing whether or not she felt the counselling was
working. This is a particularly poignant piece of data, which illustrates how Marilyn’s
hormonal and alcohol accounts are disrupted by focusing on her mother:
I don’t know how to talk to him, I don’t know it’s like an act again you know. I mean I do cry
erm, I mean I’ve cried every session erm and sometimes I don’t understand why I’ve cried
but I don’t know what to say. I find it hard to talk openly and I do get stuck there and I just
sort of try and get through it but I mean I don’t feel like what I’m talking about’s relevant to
how I’m feeling, I don’t. I am mad at me mum and I but I just don’t think that is the whole
picture and I just think most of it is all my hormones and I, I mean the imbalance in
hormones. And I’m just up and down all day.
In this narrative episode, there is a clear resistance and ambivalence towards
explaining her anger and aggression in terms of the relationship with her mother,
and Marilyn is working hard to maintain her causal explanation of hormonal
imbalance. However, her assertion that she cries at every session implies an
unhappiness for which her hormones are not wholly responsible. She is ‘mad’ at her
mother but being mad gives rise to uncomfortable and negative feelings. Marilyn’s
uneasiness with the counselling is reinforced here and strengthens the claim that
Marilyn is simply unable to act as a full participant in this sort of therapeutic
discourse.
A direct consequence of the counselling is that Marilyn is involved in a process of
remaking her anger and aggression narratives. Exploring how and where, if at all, this
alternative narrative of influential past experiences might be incorporated into her
wider story is fuelling a strong sense of desperation in Marilyn:
I can’t understand why I feel violent and it’s really confusing. I think, I feel like a scrambled
egg in my head you know.
The metaphor of a scrambled egg is a powerful indicator of how Marilyn is

experiencing the process of understanding and explaining. Scrambling an egg
involves a transformation from a coherent entity into something much more
amorphous and chaotic. The heat, which is principally responsible for this
fragmentation, resonates with the heat Marilyn feels when she is angry (Eatough &
Smith, 2005, in press). It is clear that Marilyn’s state of mind is confused and
muddled; the various explanations on offer are either not wholly satisfactory or
cannot be tolerated. She is struggling to find a meaning for her anger and aggression,
which will reduce, at least in part, the desperation she is experiencing. Close
scrutiny of her relationship with her mother threatens the familiar and more
comfortable plot lines that implicate her hormones and alcohol consumption. The
image of scrambled egg evokes fragmentation and is compounded by the profound
sense of isolation that Marilyn feels as a young mother with no friends or family to
talk to, and a partner who is frequently absent for work:
I’ve got no friends, I’ve got nobody to share owt with. Erm, and your mind does turn to
mush when you’re in the house all the time with a 3-year-old not having an adult
conversation.
The sense of a self, which is held together tenuously, is also conveyed by Marilyn’s use of
the word ‘mush’ even if it does not carry the same emotive power as the scrambled egg
metaphor. For Marilyn, not surprisingly, this sort of mental turmoil and social isolation
has given rise to feelings of madness:
I know schizophrenia is a real it’s a mental illness but it’s like two personalities having a
conversation with myself and there’s not it’s just the same opinion all the time though.
It’s not somebody else’s like I’m talking to say you, it’s not somebody else’s opinion,
they’ve got different views haven’t you, ways of looking at things but really it’s just me
looking at me, and it’s the same opinion all the time and you can feel a bit crazy
sometimes.
That Marilyn introduces the idea that her attempts at meaning making give rise to
feelings of being schizophrenic is a strong indication of how she is experiencing
herself as fragmented, as a self which is not ‘holding it together’. The experience of
feeling ‘mad’ in this sense is perhaps not too uncommon, but is suggestive of
someone who is experiencing a familiar world of meaning making crumble and
feeling there is nobody there to help. These internal conversations do not appear to
be helping Marilyn at all. A positive function of conversations with oneself can be to
clarify the events, actions, and emotions that make up one’s life. If this is not
possible for whatever reason, then these conversations can turn into internal
dialogues that simply go round and round in one’s mind. When Marilyn says ‘it’s just
me looking at me’, she is implying that her life is devoid of significant self-other
relationships that might help her in her attempt to understand and deal with her
anger and aggression.
I do hate my mum but I love her

The aim of this final section is to illuminate briefly aspects of Marilyn’s relationship
with her mother. The status of this relationship in terms of how Marilyn makes sense
of her anger and aggressive behaviour is uncertain and can only be speculated upon.
We do not know whether, as time went on, Marilyn became more comfortable with
understanding her anger and aggression as something to do with this relationship and
incorporated it into her ways of meaning making. Nor do we know whether she
stopped counselling because she found it too difficult and/or too painful, or even
unconvincing. What we do know is that, at the time of the interviews, Marilyn was
wrestling with powerful emotions concerning her mother. The analyst can make
tentative and cautious conjectures as to the possible meaning making power of this
relationship from what Marilyn does say about it. One aspect of this relationship is
discussed in light of this interpretative potential; the rejection and sense of
separateness Marilyn recalls from her childhood.
From the interview data, it is clear that Marilyn’s examination of the relationship
with her mother is a relatively recent event:
Erm I do hate me mum, through counselling I do hate my mum but I love her for being, she’s
a symbol you know.
Attributing meaning to one’s present life through the lens of past lived experiences is a
powerful contemporary cultural discourse, which different individuals have differential
access to in terms of successful subject positioning and outcome. At the time of the
interviews, feelings of pain and hurt were at the forefront of Marilyn’s consciousness as
she explored her relationship with her mother in the counselling sessions. The next two
extracts illustrate how Marilyn experiences rejection on two fronts: she is not her
brother and she looks like her father:
My mum was always with my brother, he was always you know, he was the lad and my mum
used to be like, say that I used to look like my dad and she didn’t like me dad so I always
thought she didn’t like me. It was that type of relationship not close at all.
A lot of it, it’s around my mum, I think she’s said hurtful things comparing me to my dad,
you know, you’re just like your dad, you look just like your dad and I always used to think to
myself, well you hate my dad, you must really hate me you know, you wouldn’t have
divorced him if you didn’t like him.
By the time most children reach adulthood, they are aware that there are qualitative
differences in the ways they are loved by their parents. For most people, this is a
positive experience in that their individual qualities make up who they are and they
are loved, if not because of them, then at least in spite of them. However, feeling that
a sibling is preferred over oneself is very different, especially if that preference is
overlaid with a negative comparison to a disliked and absent parent. Moreover, as a
child, Marilyn not only felt that her mother loved her brother more but that she
actually hated Marilyn.
Below, Marilyn offers an explanation as to why her mother preferred her brother.
The extract is a powerful illustration of how the individual life is lived out in a relational
matrix of enormous complexity, which is embedded in a web of social and cultural
meanings:
Like I said, she was always my brother [sic]. I mean my brother could never do anything
wrong but I think that was because she was in two minds whether he was my stepfather’s.
She, I think she’d been having an affair with him and I think she might have thought he was
my stepfather’s and not my real dad’s. She used to always compare me to my dad in my ways
and my looks and my actions and that and it just wasn’t, but I mean there was never any
affection. I mean I can’t remember ever her putting her arm around me and kissing me. Erm,
my stepdad he used to but my mum never. My dad was very loving, I remember that, he
really was.
Not only does this extract illuminate the complicated nature of the family nexus, it is
a potent display of how Marilyn experiences the relationships. The opening sentence,
‘I mean like I said she was always my brother’ carries tremendous symbolic force; her
mother and brother do not simply have a close bond, rather they have
psychologically merged for Marilyn into ‘one’ person. Similarly, Marilyn and her
father have become ‘one’, and it is a ‘one’ that is hated by her mother. From Marilyn’s
perspective, there is a clear division between herself and her father who looked and
behaved the same (the old family), and her mother, brother and stepfather (the new
family). The affection Marilyn received from her father and stepfather was not
enough to compensate for her mother’s lack of it. Possibly, this is because from the
age of 10, Marilyn saw little of her father and as she approached adolescence, their
relationship deteriorated.
It is not clear when Marilyn first became aware that her brother might only be
her stepbrother but whenever the suspicion arose, it offered an explanation for the
perceived rejection. Nevertheless, having an explanation does not ease Marilyn’s
pain; rather, mother and brother and stepfather become identified in a way that
Marilyn cannot be part of. They form a nexus that amplifies Marilyn’s sense of
separateness.
Moreover, the mother–daughter relationship is almost always critical to the
development of a daughter’s positive sense of self. If this relationship is characterized by
a lack of emotional warmth and/or physical affection in childhood, then it is possible
that the adult sense of self is experienced as unlovable and unworthy. In the context of
Marilyn’s life-story, her relationship with her mother helps to construct an impoverished
past as well as a bleak future. Given the repeated reference to her mother as other
explanations for her anger and aggression break down, it seems highly probable that her
conception of the early relationship with her mother is playing into her anger and
aggressive behaviour.
Discussion
In this section, we build on some of the analytic observations already made by
examining them through a theoretical lens. First, we look at the two long-standing
frameworks of meaning Marilyn makes use of: hormones and alcohol. Second, we
examine how the breakdown of these frameworks of meaning is echoed by a
fragmentation of self. Finally, we briefly examine the role of counselling, Marilyn’s
resistance to it, and its concomitant emphasis on the importance of her relationship
with her mother.
Frameworks of meaning making: hormones and alcohol

We contend that this sort of interpretative analysis illuminates how both traditional
social cognition perspectives and discourse analytic accounts of ‘explanation’ neglect
the experiencing, meaning making person and what she/he brings to the telling of a
life. Paradoxically, the prescriptive and reductive aspects of both approaches are
brought to the fore through Marilyn’s attempts to understand. The normative and
unidirectional causal sequences found in attribution and appraisal research are
undermined when faced with the messy and turbulent reality of individual meaning
making.
Marilyn’s meaning making is crumbling and this experience bears little relation to
causal attribution models that aim to establish relations of cause and effect. Within the
context of the individual life-world, these relations are often difficult to discern and
speculative. We would suggest that attribution approaches, with their reliance on
matching cause with effect, are simply unable to explain the complexity of a person’s
meaning making. Similarly, cognitive emotion theories, which give the concept of
appraisal centre place, neglect meaning making and the interpersonal communicative
function of emotional experience (Parkinson, 1997). Undoubtedly, emotional reactions
have an evaluative component, but to reduce this to simply a function of cognitive
processing is to ignore the experiencing inter-subjective person. For example,
elsewhere we have reported how the body plays a crucial role (Eatough & Smith, in
press) in women’s meaning making around anger. The meaning-making activity of the
individual sometimes involves rational appraisal, but it also entails being imaginative,
intuiting, and intentional.
Likewise, although we recognize that personal meaning making is constrained by
available cultural discourses and social conventions, individuals struggle and realize
them differently in the context of their unique personal and social history. As Rosenwald
rightly states:
If a life is no more than a story and a story is governed only by the situation in which it is
told, then one cannot declare a situation unlivable or a life damaged. (1992, p. 269)
Marilyn’s accounts of her lived experiences are illustrative of how her sense of self, her
stories, and her situations both challenge and embrace understanding through
contemporary cultural discourses. The remainder of this section discusses the
restrictive nature of these frameworks of meaning. Our view is that causal attribution
and rational appraisal theories need to be elaborated upon before they can adequately
contribute to an understanding of the sorts of conceptually complex and multi layered
attributions and appraisals that are involved in human meaning making. Similarly, we
argue that individuals’ meaning making is constituted, at least in part, by cultural
discourses and conventions, but is not determined by them.
The analysis demonstrated that Marilyn made associative links between her
infertility, her depression, and her anger and aggression. This is not surprising given that
the influence of hormones on women’s behaviour is a culturally powerful discourse,
which denies women moral agency. In terms of explaining women’s anger and
aggression, hormonal explanations form one half of a ‘mad or bad’ dichotomy. Cultural
discourses of women’s anger construct their experience of this emotion as negative and
deviant in terms of their gender. Research suggests that when women get angry they feel
themselves to be in a no-win situation (Campbell & Muncer, 1987). Lashing out either
physically or verbally is experienced as a loss of control and as not conforming to
dominant norms of femininity (bad). However, if women exercise control and express
their anger through crying, then they are often perceived as ‘hysterical’ (mad). This is
not to say that fluctuating hormonal levels do not have some role in Marilyn’s potent
feelings of anger and aggressive behaviour. There is the fertility problem when she was
younger, she had been treated for depression with a tricyclic antidepressant, and it is
possible that at the time of the interviews, Marilyn was suffering from post-natal
depression. Moreover, it is highly probable that the fertility problem would have
influenced Marilyn’s menstrual cycle.
However, whether or not hormones are actually an important contributory factor
in Marilyn’s anger and aggression cannot be ascertained from the interview data.
What is important is that she believes they do. The analysis illustrates clearly how
hormones are a crucial component of Marilyn’s meaning making, and the question as
to why this is the case can be addressed. Causal explanations that invoke hormones
are part of a medicalized discourse, which suggests that there is a solution in the
form of treatment to rectify an ostensible imbalance. They work by denying
individual moral agency. Marilyn’s adherence to a hormonal account constructs the
experience of her anger and aggression as one that renders her passive in the face of
forces beyond her control.
Equally, it is unsurprising that alcohol plays some sort of role in Marilyn’s stories
of her anger and aggression. As with hormonal explanations, there is a wealth of
empirical evidence that concludes that alcohol consumption often increases levels of
aggressive behaviour (Bushman & Cooper, 1990). Alcohol disrupts how individuals
process information; researchers call this alcohol myopia (Steele & Josephs, 1990).
Nevertheless, despite this evidence, the relationship between the two is over-
simplified and overstated in dominant lay and psychological frameworks of meaning.
When Marilyn says ‘it was the alcohol’, she is invoking a simple causal attribution
that ignores the wider interpersonal context in which her behaviour takes place. This
sort of oversimplification encourages the individual to view her/himself as passive
and as having no control, because making alcohol responsible is an easier option.
Although it does not make the behaviour socially acceptable, it is a socially
acknowledged and understood statement, which can often go unchallenged. This is
in spite of the fact that such causal attributions are never wholly convincing at either
the intra-psychic or the interpersonal levels.
The analysis above highlights the contradictions within Marilyn’s accounts as she
wrestles with the internal and external challenges to her hormonal and alcohol
explanations. For example, in the extract in which she offers an explanation of her fight
with Simon, the role of alcohol is weakened when it becomes clear that Marilyn’s rage is
more to do with the experience of public shame that requires redress. In this incident,
Marilyn’s aggression was not simply a consequence of intoxication levels, but also to do
with personal worth and integrity.
Researchers have demonstrated that aggression is one consequence of threats to the
self (Baumeister, Smart, & Boden, 1999; Campbell, 1984). Explanations centring on
public humiliation or a fear of rejection require a conscious and inwardly reflective
scrutiny, and point to a sense of self that is experienced as fragile and ruptured. By
invoking alcohol, any real attempt to understand what is happening beyond immediate
antecedent events is effectively closed down.
The self, meaning making and narrative reconstruction

At the time of the interviews, Marilyn was strongly motivated to deal with her angry
feelings and aggressive behaviour. She had sought help from her doctor because she was
concerned that her son, Andrew, was becoming a target of her anger and aggression.
However, Marilyn’s request for medication was met by the suggestion to have
counselling and she had had several sessions by the time we met. Thus, throughout the
interviews, I had a very strong sense that Marilyn was involved in a struggle to re-story
her life. (Gergen, 1999, p. 172).
This reconstructive function is a key aspect of many counselling and
psychotherapeutic approaches. The underlying principle is a narrative one; clients
are encouraged to reconstruct their lived experiences in order to make their lives
more livable. For example, the counsellor/therapist works with the client to enable a
shift from a regressive narrative to a progressive one in the hope that she/he is left
with an increased feeling of empowerment and a greater sense of well-being. Indeed,
Jacobs (1986) suggests that one aim of counselling is to investigate the past so that ‘it
can be faced, renegotiated and in some respects even relived “but with a new
ending”’ (p. 5).
In Marilyn’s case, it appears that the counselling was persuading her to reject
medicalized discourses, which constructed her anger and aggression as problems
within her that can be treated, and was encouraging her to explore how the
relationship with her mother might be implicated. Arguably, this would provide
Marilyn with the opportunity to separate her self from the anger and aggression
‘problem’. This has been called problem externalization and it aims to develop an
alternative, more livable story (White & Epston, 1990). However, although the
ultimate aim might be to shift from a negative to a positive and valued end point,
along the way, this reconstructive process can have profound consequences for one’s
sense of self.
Importantly, before counselling, Marilyn was already struggling to maintain the
explanations for her hormones and alcohol as satisfactory explanations for her feelings
and behaviour. They had afforded her a certain sense of comfort in that they removed
responsibility from her. However, becoming a mother had destabilized the passive and
non-agentic self such discourses constructed. Her shame and guilt at Andrew becoming
a target had begun the process of self-reconstruction (Smith, 1991). The sense of a self in
deterioration was deepened as Marilyn explored her relationship with her mother. Thus,
for Marilyn, the counselling sessions were not only contributing to the breakdown of
her familiar plot lines, they appeared to be adding to her sense of desperation, fuelling
the disintegration of her sense of self:
A plot based on the idea that one is worthy and deserving of love is unable to integrate the
recollection that a parent was abusive. When the operating plot begins to disintegrate, one’s
identity loses its unity (Polkinghorne, 1991, p. 149).
As a result, we would suggest that Marilyn feels increased desperation evidenced by the
fact that she is experiencing herself as a self that is scrambled and confused. At the time
of the interviews, Marilyn’s meaning making was literally a mess. Attributions of alcohol
and hormones were unsatisfactory and the counselling was pushing her into uncharted
and difficult territory. Marilyn was experiencing this breakdown as an internal dialogue,
and it is not surprising that she describes herself as feeling ‘a bit crazy sometimes’,
leading her to wonder whether she might be schizophrenic. Her chronic anger and rage,
coupled with the failure of her meaning making, are leading her to question her mental
state.
Marilyn’s accounts strongly hint at a lack of familiarity and knowledge with the
therapeutic process. When she says, ‘I’d like somebody to tell me what to do’, she is
signalling that she has difficulty engaging in a way of being that requires an active
and reflexive self. This unfamiliarity, coupled with the fracturing of long-standing
explanations, might be contributing to the resistance that appears to permeate her
accounts. The assimilation model (Stiles et al., 1990) proposes that for therapy to be
successful, clients should progress through a developmental sequence of recognizing,
reformulating, understanding, and resolving the problematic experiences that
brought them into therapy initially (Stiles, 2002). The sequence is conceptualized
as a continuum of eight stages/levels (0 ¼ warded off/dissociated through to
7 ¼ integration/mastery), which are differentiated by affective and cognitive
characteristics (Stiles, 2002). In Marilyn’s case, we wonder whether she is at an
intermediate point (1.5) between unwanted thoughts/avoidance (level one) and
vague awareness/emergence (level two). Similarly, a process-experiential approach to
change (Elliott, Watson, Goldman, & Greenberg, 2004) suggests that clients who,
possibly for the first time, are confronting painful and difficult life events can feel
anxious and beleaguered. They propose a range of experiential tasks aimed at
developing greater emotional intelligence, which include encouraging the clients to
systematically examine and reflect on internal experience. If our assumption that
Marilyn is ill at ease and unclear as to how therapy can help her is correct, then these
approaches have much to offer.
To conclude, this study has presented a richly detailed and nuanced analysis of
personal meaning making from the perspective of a female participant. The careful
application of an idiographic approach suggests that personal meaning making is an
irreducible part of psychological life. The meaning-making person cannot be reduced to
the internal cognitive activity of hypothesized causal relationships, even if we can
demonstrate that this is what people do at least some of the time. Likewise, meaning
making is always more than the prevailing discourses and conventions of a culture,
although these form an inevitable part of it. The meaning of Marilyn’s anger is also
derived from a potent mix of real feelings, emotional tonality, and struggles within
herself. Marilyn’s exploration of her relationship with her mother through counselling is
encouraging her to tell a different narrative, a process that, at the time of the interviews,
was contributing to her existing anguish.
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Received 18 August 2004; revised version received 24 January 2005
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I feel like a scrambled egg in my head:

Virginia Eatough* and Jonathan A. Smith

116 Virginia Eatough and Jonathan A. Smith

component (Strongman, 2003). Explicitly cognitive theories range from simple

Meaning making and anger 117

118 Virginia Eatough and Jonathan A. Smith

of these oppositions is to manage accountability and to counter alternative accounts of

Meaning making and anger 119

120 Virginia Eatough and Jonathan A. Smith

Meaning making and anger 121

‘That’s all hormones’

122 Virginia Eatough and Jonathan A. Smith

‘It was the alcohol’

Meaning making and anger 123

‘I think I got depressed’

124 Virginia Eatough and Jonathan A. Smith

‘I still feel desperate’

Meaning making and anger 125

Most counselling and psychotherapeutic approaches require the client to assume an

126 Virginia Eatough and Jonathan A. Smith

The metaphor of a scrambled egg is a powerful indicator of how Marilyn is

Meaning making and anger 127

I do hate my mum but I love her

128 Virginia Eatough and Jonathan A. Smith

Meaning making and anger 129

Frameworks of meaning making: hormones and alcohol

130 Virginia Eatough and Jonathan A. Smith

Meaning making and anger 131

The self, meaning making and narrative reconstruction

132 Virginia Eatough and Jonathan A. Smith

Meaning making and anger 133

134 Virginia Eatough and Jonathan A. Smith

Meaning making and anger 135

Received 18 August 2004; revised version received 24 January 2005

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