Oliver James, a clinical psychologist, on Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger's rivalry

As the race for the Premiership has got tighter, the exchanges between Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger have reached new levels of intensity and vitriol. The wars of words are often described as mind games but the managers of Manchester United and Arsenal have recently found a more basic level of sparring.

Public arguments about Sol Campbell's elbow in Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's face during the encounter between the teams 10 days ago have become personal and accompanied by accusations of dishonesty and violence. Wenger reignited the flames yesterday with another attack on Solskjaer after Campbell's appeal against his sending off was rejected.

Exchanges like these, which have passed between the two men since Wenger's arrival in September 1996, are frequently characterised as Machiavellian attempts to improve the morale of players and upset opponents. You would not expect a shrink to settle for something so simple.

Graeme Souness says of the mind games: "Managers are doing it mostly for themselves and maybe because it's what they think the supporters want to hear. The players laugh it off - they did when I was playing and they still do."

Like Souness, I suspect the deeper purpose of these spats is to express the managers' pathologies. That Wenger and Ferguson are men of contrasting method and philosophy is clear; that their respective backgrounds have forged their approach to conflict perhaps equally so.

Circumstances serve to acutely illustrate the contrast in approach: both men are being tested to the limit. The tension surrounding this season has grown still more now the championship is the major remaining target for both teams.

As the end-game approaches, both men's public pronouncements are probably more designed to unsettle the other than to affect players. Having seen Kevin Keegan crack up in the face of his verbal chicanery, there must be few things Ferguson would like better than to witness Wenger lose his cool.

But that is highly unlikely and Ferguson is more at risk of boiling over. After Wednesday's tutorial in mesmerism from Real Madrid, the Premiership is his last throw of the dice this season. For Wenger, there is still the FA Cup and anyway, he is so phlegmatic and philosophical his work will never get to him.

You might suppose that the two managers are merely very different types who find each other irritatingly different, even threateningly so, and when they comment on each other their mutual antipathy slips out.

When manager of Aberdeen, Ferguson was also often engaged in public aggression towards Celtic and Rangers, playing the underdog. But rather than concluding he would employ such tactics ever after because they worked, I suspect it is more a case of him having a deep need to joust, dating back to a tough childhood.

At a simple level, the taunts between the pair are a form of class war. When, in 1997, Ferguson asked of Wenger: "What does he know about football, coming from Japan?" he was only using the overt, confrontational style of a working-class Glaswegian. Ferguson also has the conventionally manly bravura of his background. Last year he said: "We have played the best football in England, scored the most goals." Wenger's retort illustrated their difference: "Everyone thinks that they have the prettiest wife." This slyer, more covert form of self-assertion is what we might expect of a middle-class man with a university degree in economics. It also reflects a more middle-class notion of how to be a man - less directly adversarial, keener to win arguments by similes and cold logic than by verbal punches to the jaw.

According to Ferguson, his father was "a strict disciplinarian" and he puts a lot of his success down to a guidance imposed with an "iron fist". His father was a Clyde shipyard worker and Ferguson wrote that "the Clyde made the man and that man made me". Ferguson says his brother Martin "used to batter me . . . we used to fight like cat and dog" and, when not fighting with him, Ferguson's school hours were punctuated by abundant scrapping.

Such a hard childhood often results in both depression and violence in men but Ferguson managed to channel them into football. The boot that cut David Beckham's eyebrow suggests words remain sometimes insufficient to express his anger.

Nonetheless, he has long since ceased to be physically violent. Rather, his childhood will have left him expecting to be attacked and the interesting thing is the extent to which our early experiences still govern our adult expectations.

Recent studies suggest we will go to great lengths to try to recreate our childhoods in our choice of lovers and friends. Above all, we will provoke or manipulate people to behave in ways that conform with our childhood experiences. If little Ferguson was liable to be attacked, then trying to pick verbal fights could be his way of making the present familiar.

Almost certainly, Ferguson sees Wenger as a threat. Deep down Ferguson probably sees the Frenchman as a weak, effeminate, duplicitous "bad" person who needs to be taught a lesson in the importance of discipline.

And what of Wenger who had a middle-class childhood spent in Strasbourg in the Alsace region of northern France? Little is known of his early experiences. However, there is every reason to think they were not as traumatic as Ferguson's. His parents owned a bar/restaurant and to judge by his reactions to his rival's provocations, he is not easily made paranoid, suggesting he was not the object of much aggression.

Unlike Fergie Wenger has few interests outside football. He lives with his girlfriend, their young daughter and a huge flatscreen TV in north London. Football mad from childhood, he discovered a love of teaching while at university. Unable to achieve more than a few appearances for Strasbourg, he decided to teach others instead.

He is not easily moved to anger, an urbane, considerate and cerebral man who has rarely lost his temper in his six years at Arsenal. When asked if he hates Ferguson, he said: "I have no hate for anybody."

United's manager usually provokes the verbal jousting but, while it may have helped Ferguson when he was at Aberdeen and probably did work against Keegan, it is of no concern to Wenger.