There are many insightful portrayals and representations of envy in literature and popular culture. For example, in a small book by Joseph Epstein (2003), the characters of Iago in Othello, Claggart in Billy Budd, and Uriah Heep in David Copperfield are seen as insightful studies in envy. In the film Seven (1995, Dir. David Fincher), the serial killer chooses each of the seven deadly sins on which to base his crimes, leaving to last, the worst sin of all, envy. Curiously, another recent film, A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001, Dir. Steven Spielberg) involves a story that examines the nature of love. However, although the issue of jealousy is explored, it is the omission of any serious treatment of envy that seriously undermines the film's impact. In the film, Amadeus (1984, Dir. Milos Forman), based on the original stage play by Peter Shaffer, the rivalry between Mozart and Salieri is explored. The story highlights Salieri's jealousy of Mozart's musical genius, but Salieri's conflict is really with God. Why has God granted Mozart such ability, and not him? In fact, it needs to be understood that Salieri is jealous of Mozart, but he is envious of God. At first, such an observation might seem rather odd, but it is precisely this issue that we will be concerned with in this lecture. 

Envy is closely linked to the human experience of love, and in examining this relationship we will need to make some important distinctions between envy, jealousy and greed. To do this we will need to draw on some psychoanalytical concepts taken from object-relations theory, in particular from the work of Melanie Klein. Eventually, my goal is to place this entire discussion within the context of a transpersonal approach to counselling and psychotherapy. Finally, I will relate these ideas, and Klein's concepts of gratitude and reparation, to a discussion of the dynamics of love and hate, which was first given serious attention in the pioneering work of the Scottish psychiatrist, Ian Suttie (1935).

One of the obstacles to such a project can be dealt with by simply considering an alternative to the deterministic, mechanistic model that Freudian psychoanalytic theory is often taken for. Instead, I prefer to view psychoanalysis as offering plausible narrative accounts of behaviour and experience. I also take the view that narrative is a primary mode of thought, and that the ego is a narrativizing device (for example, see Stern, 2004). From this point of view, psychoanalysis provides a hermeneutic model for both normal and pathological development, particularly identifying the crucial early experiences that have lasting meaning in people's lives. The emphasis in psychoanalytical technique is to focus on the unspoken core parts of the personality (nb. infant [Latin]= without speech). These "unspoken" parts of the personality can manifest as unconscious conflicts in client case material, and it was Freud’s great insight that these are revealed in two distinct ways, (i) retrospective subjectivity (ie. phantasy, dreams, symptoms, observations, etc.), and (ii) present-centred inter-subjectivity (i.e. transference, therapeutic alliance, etc.). Thus, classical psychoanalysis offers a model of the psyche in terms of a conflict metaphor (i.e. a conflict narrative), for example, the conflicts between ego-id, good-bad, love-hate. Of course other narratives are possible, but the conflict narrative is a useful model for primitive, early processes.

Object relations is a system of psychological explanation based on the premise that the mind is comprised of elements taken in from outside, primarily aspects of the functioning of other persons. This occurs by means of the processes of internalization. This model of the mind explains mental functions in terms of relations between the various elements internalized. The British Object-relations School was pioneered in the work of Ian Suttie, Melanie Klein, Ronald Fairbairn, Harry Guntrip, Wilfred Bion, Donald Winnicott, and Michael Balint. The notion of object was first developed by Freud in relation to his instinct theory. The object designates the thing (usually a person or part-person) through which an instinctual drive is able to achieve its aim. Although Freud used the term imprecisely, it has come to occupy the cornerstone of modern psychoanalytic theory. Good accounts of object relations theory can be found in Greenberg & Mitchell (1983), Bacal & Newman (1990), St. Clair (1986) and Gomez (1997).

Object relations theory is the full realization of Freud's attempt to move "beyond the pleasure principle". The human psyche is recognized as not simply governed by a need to satisfy its basic drives. Objects that come to signify a particular drive reduction, become sought after merely for themselves. Therefore, in object relations theory, the psyche is seen to be object-seeking rather than pleasure seeking. 

For the infant, the first object is a part object, e.g. the mother's breast. The infant does not respond to the mother as a whole person, but simply as a "breast", a supplier of its needs. In turn, the breast becomes an object of desire in its own right. The ego is strengthened by the finding of "good" objects. Their internalization (introjection and identification) is important for the development of psychic structure and mental functioning. The infant's mind in effect results from the formation of an "internal world" populated by these objects. 

Central to the theory is the distinction between part/whole objects, good/bad objects, idealized objects, object constancy, transitional objects, etc., etc. The psyche through projection attributes or places unacceptable feelings onto objects, and through splitting, which is a primitive mental mechanism, can distinguish between the pleasurable and non-pleasurable aspects of the same object. These processes serve both an adaptive and defensive function.

However, the infant clearly invests the mother’s "breast" with qualities that go far beyond the actual nourishment it affords. Inevitably the breast will fail to live up to these expectations - it is not perfect. The infant's early emotional life is characterized by a sense of losing and regaining the good object. The innate conflict between love and hate leads to the internalization of good objects and bad objects. Such conflict is essential for normal enrichment and growth of the personality and strengthening of the ego. Thus, conflict, and the need to overcome it, is seen as fundamental to human creativeness. With the mother's breast being experienced as both good and bad, the internal object splits along with the ego. This splitting results from the ego's early lack of cohesion, and acts as a defence against primordial anxiety, achieving a dispersal of the destructive and persecutory anxieties, and offering a mechanism for the ego to be preserved. An important distinction needs to be made between the good and idealized object. An extremely deep split usually occurs between an idealized object and an extremely bad object.

Klein uses Freud's notion of the death instinct (thanatos) to explain the infant's instinctive response to anxiety. For Klein, complications of ego growth stem from idealization, persecutory anxiety, frustration caused by absences and loss, and fear of annihilation. Indeed, it is fear of annihilation which is primary - a fear of something that destroys from within, but it is experienced as being outside (i.e. something physical). The manic defences that can be mobilized to relieve the guilt aroused by the destructive fantasies of the depressed psyche are described in her classical paper:- "A contribution to the psychogenesis of manic-depressive states" (Klein, 1935). For good accounts of Klein's work see Grosskurth (1986), Hinshelwood (1991), Likierman (2001), Mitchell (1986), Sayers (1991, 2000), Segal (1964; 1979).

Jealousy implies envy of the actual or presumed advantage of a rival, especially in regard to the love of an object. Jealousy is often accompanied by suspicion that the loved person favours the other. Deriving from the oedipal conflict, jealousy is based on the wish for an exclusive relationship to the primary object. Unresolved jealousy can lead to the impossibility of forming meaningful relationships and lack of maturity of ego and Self. It raises issues of sharing, ownership, possessiveness. The qualities of the jealous client are included in Table 1.

Klein is often seen as claiming that the young infant has an innate destructive drive to destroy everything that is good. I will argue that this is simply a misunderstanding of the mechanism of envy. One view that is worth taking seriously is that proposed by Likierman (2001) who argues that Klein really offers two theories of envy. The first sees envy as involving a gratuitous aggression towards anything that is good, while the second sees envy as the fragile infant ego responding to a deprivation of some kind. This deprivation may even be minimal, or momentary. While I do not go along with this distinction fully, I do think it is a useful place to begin, with the second of these two theories being the focus here.

The best way to understand envy is to see it as the angry feeling that another (person) possesses, and is withholding, or keeping to itself, something one desires for oneself. The other person is, at the same time, to be seen as the reliable source for what one desires, and seen as possessing and withholding and keeping for itself something that "I want." Envy is the feeling of conflict that what one desires, and would normally be forthcoming, is being withheld. The envious impulse is to attach, or to spoil the very source that one originally relied upon. This impulse can become diabolically destructive and undermining, since it mobilizes such powerful defences -  devaluation of the good object, or rigid idealization. The infant's feeling of failed gratification is experienced as the breast withholding, or keeping for itself, the object of desire. Envy is therefore more basic than jealousy, and is one of the most primitive and fundamental of emotions.

Envy stems from an immature intolerance to frustration. In her work, Melanie Klein found that the first object to be envied was the breast. This is primary envy, and if tolerated, and worked through, will lead to normal development. But when the experience of envy is excessive this can lead to a weakened ego. The mechanism of envy involves attacking the good breast, so that introjection can no longer occur. In envy, there is an aim to possess the good object, but when this is felt to be impossible, the aim becomes a need to spoil the goodness of the object, in order to remove the source of envious feelings. Consequently, envy is the diabolical need to destroy the very source of goodness that maturation and growth requires. Moreover, this primitive envy can be experienced in later development as unconscious envy, and can be revived in the therapeutic alliance as a negative transference.

Unconscious envy always implies the subject's relation to only one other person, and relates back to the earliest exclusive relation with the mother, as good object. The subject envies the object for some possession or quality, initially in terms of part-objects, but this inevitably will persist into whole object relations.

Envy, therefore, is both a characteristic of early infancy and the personality in adulthood. An envious person may feel sickened at the sight of enjoyment, they may feel easy only in the misery of others. Envy often serves to stir up envy and jealousy in others. A consequence of excessive envy is an early onset of guilt - a guilt felt as persecution, and the object arousing the guilt as the persecutor. Indeed the deepest sources of guilt are always linked with the envy of the primary good object (the breast), and with feelings of having spoilt its goodness by envious attacks.

Defences against envy quickly lead to psychopathology, because they fail to prevent the destructive operation of envy. Unresolved primary envy can lead to psychotic symptoms in later life. Envy is commonly accompanied by self-pity, self-destructiveness, etc. Withdrawal of the good object, when not dealt with in rage and outward destructiveness, will turn inwards. The ego can implode and destroy itself. Suicide may be a later expression of the early need to self destroy which the infant cannot express for itself. The qualities that might manifest in the envious client are included in Table 1.

It is my view that greediness is a primary state, a basic expression of Self and of desire. An intensity of greed, can lead to envy. Greediness can exhaust the good object, such that it seems to be withholding, setting up precisely the conditions for envy. The infant has no inkling of the limits of the world, limits of the mother, or the breast. It has no idea that the demands it will make cannot always be met instantly, and in full. A primary task in human development is to temper such demands, through a capacity for concern (Winnicott, 1963).

For the mature ego, greediness and neediness will be a continuing theme. Although, in my experience with clients who are not seriously disturbed, a common complication is a denial of greediness, sometimes experienced as emptiness. This stems from a conflict with the super-ego. It is not unusual in such cases to uncover damage or vulnerability in some early good object (n.b. Winnicott calls this the locus of concern). This may then be sufficient to result in the client's greediness being denied for fear of exhausting or completely destroying the good object.

Persistent gratification leads to more experiences of enjoyment and gratitude, and accordingly there is a wish to return pleasure. This recurrent experience makes possible gratitude at the deepest level and plays an important role in the capacity to make reparation. Klein emphasizes that gratitude is the goal of the psychoanalytic process.

There have certainly been attempts to forge links between the work of Klein and that of Carl Jung (e.g. Fordham, 1995). Jungians have found obvious parallels between Klein's paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions and Jung's notion of archetypal processes expressing themselves in human unfoldment. However, I would like to explore these parallels a little further by taking them to a transpersonal level of understanding.

Recently, I became interested in Jung's treatment of the coincidentia oppositorium, the coincidence or conjunction of opposites. In this exploration I have been particularly helped by the work of William Blake (see Hiles, 2001).

The coincidentia oppositorium is an idea that occupies an important place in Jung's psychology. It is particularly important to realize that what is at stake in this conjunction is not the basic recognition of opposites, nor the simple interplay of opposites in our experience, nor even the union or marriage of opposites, but the shocking realization of their conjunction in the same object or situation.  The reason why the coincidentia oppositorium is so crucial is that it does not simply represent the opposition of hate and love, but represents hating and loving the same object. This, of course, is exactly the condition which can precipitate human envy, and is possibly a conflict that it is necessary for us to confront very early in our development, indeed throughout our lives. In this respect, it can be seen that envy is the central challenge to our psychic growth, i.e. resolving the "paradox" of loving and hating the same object. Jealousy is the outcome of the difficulties in sharing the loved object with someone else, and greed is merely asking, or demanding, too much from the loved object.

It is important to realize that hating one object, and loving another, is hardly a challenging experience. But hating and loving the same object, now that is a completely different matter!! And I want to argue that this is a theme, or what Jung would call a psychic truth, that must lie at the core of an existential-transpersonal model of human experience. It is almost certain that the fearful symmetry which William Blake refers to in his poem, The Tyger, is precisely this conjunction:

"Tyger, Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?"
                                     William Blake  (The Tyger)

In my own study of Jung and Blake, I have proposed that it is precisely this conjunction that constitutes the God archetype, which Jung equates with the archetype of the Self (Hiles, 2001). Confrontation with this archetype reveals the tragic contradictoriness of the Self, and also of God (as Jung points out), and is experienced as the dark night of the soul. The coincidentia oppositorium is the crucial archetype of the human psyche, it is the ultimate challenge to human growth, it is the unconscious conflict at the core of human existence. And, with respect to what we are discussing here, it is clear that it presents itself to us at critical stages throughout life, from the earliest stages of human growth as primary envy (Klein, 1957), through the inevitable experiences of loss across the lifespan, to the later stages in the prospect of death. Placed in this context, Klein's theory of unconscious envy takes on a new significance. Envy is the expression of an archetype that lies at the core of our being, and it would seem, it is an archetype that must find expression very early in our unfoldment. Envy takes on a transpersonal significance, as an in-built mechanism for dealing with life's inherent limitations. Indeed, if we take this claim seriously, then it does not take much effort to realize that the God archetype could not manifest itself in human consciousness in any other way. It is therefore my claim that envy is a necessary condition for human growth.

Suttie does not refer explicitly to envy in his work, but it is clearly implied in his discussion of hate. In the preface to the the 1960 edition of Suttie's book, J.A. Hadfield writes:

" . . [Suttie . ]  rejected the idea that the infant is born a bundle of instincts. He held that the infant was born with a simple attachment to the mother, who is the sole source of food and protection. [ . . ] Basing the origin of love in this primal attachment of the child to the mother, he finds both fear and hatred to be due to the deprivation of that attachment. We can only hate a person whose love we desire, seems to be his theme" (Suttie, 1935/1960, p. 16).

Suttie writes:

"Hatred, I consider, is just a standing reproach to the hated person, and owes all its meaning to a demand for love" (Suttie, 1935/1960, p. 37).

Suttie anticipates by more than twenty years the ideas of Melanie Klein, and he also clearly anticipates the particular distinction between two theories of envy made by Likierman more than 60 years later. The neglect of Suttie's work is a rather poor reflection on the field of psychotherapy. However, as a bridge between object relations and transpersonal theory, his work may finally receive the recognition it deserves. The point is that the process of envy and jealousy and greed are all expressions of the complex dynamics of love and hate, involving the crucial archetypes that will steer the ego from its omnipotent origins to its eventual position of maturity. I would like to sum up my own belief as follows:-

This, of course, echoes the words of the Buddha:

           "In this world hate has never yet dispelled hate. 
            Only love dispels hate."
                                                            Dhammapada.

 

References

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