"This is very, very far away from the majority view of modern psychology (which has dismissed the vast majority of Freudian thought), but I still hear it repeated all the damn time."

Actually a lot of therapists still use personal mythology construction as a therapy tool, which is very similar to Freud's idea of directing anger outward in the sense that both creating a new identity for the person or strengthening their existing one. It's basically the same idea but expanded a bit and better explained. If you search for personal mythology on Amazon there are all sorts of books about this.