Pychology of revenge - a viewpoint

Is revenge a natural instinct?

We have been told and advised many a time that anger does no good to the body. To be successful in life, we should control anger and our urge to take revenge. However one will never be able to find a person who has total control over this human emotion. Even though we realize that 'anger' is bad for our health and to take revenge as a corollary of this anger is even worse, we get trapped by these negative emotions. An uncontrolled anger and spirit of revenge could result in increase in our stress level leading to high blood pressure and if neglected could lead to heart attacks/ strokes that  can turn out to be fatal or cripple us permanently. Inspite of being aware of the negative effects of anger, we don’t seem to have any control over it and manifests subconsciously. Some could be good at masking it and some may demonstrate it with ferocity but we have to concede that all of us are afflicted with this weakness. Even great religious leaders who are supposed to have spent their lifetime in meditation, reading and understanding scriptures are not free from this shortcoming. This made me wonder whether ‘God’ has designed our psyche in that fashion. I think got an explanation to this question from a 6 year old child.

This girl along with her mother and other close relatives had come to our house the other day. She was quite active and talkative. To engage her in a conversation, one of us in the group asked her what she wanted to do when she grew old. Pat came the reply, I will get married! It aroused an immediate curiosity in all of us. When asked further as to what will you do after getting married she said without any hesitation that she will have children. That startled us no end. Then what will you do was the next obvious question and she said that I will scold them the way my mother scolds me.

I am not sure whether she is very angry with her mother and was detesting the ‘controls’ the mother was putting on her because she was also very affectionate to her mother in other contexts. But may be because she could not ‘give back’ to her mother in the same coin when she was getting 'rebuked', she thought of having a ‘target’ in her children to satisfy this urge.

Most of our misery is due to this major weakness. We find extremely difficult to tolerate any insult to our ego – we find difficult to accept our failures and shortcomings. We do not readily give credit to the opponent. If we find the opponent too much for us, we look for a ‘soft target’ whom we can bully and in turn this soft corner will search for a still ‘softer corner’ to bully and it goes on ad infinitum.

I find this behavior strange, interesting and at the same time in a way frightening. I invite your comments on this aspect.