Whose Defective Self is it Anyway?: Response to Gerhardt’s “Libidinal and Destructive Envy”

Abstract

This discussion is a response to Julie Gerhardt’s interesting and broad-reaching paper on libidinal and destructive envy. Gerhardt makes a valuable contribution in exploring the intersubjective roots of envy in early identificatory refusal and maternal narcissism, and in emphasizing the complexity of envy. I differ with her on several points theoretically, including her interpretation of Klein’s seminal construct and her application of social and evolutionary psychology. I appreciate her deconstruction of envy into libidinal and destructive components but question the usefulness of delineating envy into these two separate types. I discuss the clinical vignettes through a bidirectional relational lens, focusing on the intricacy of working through highly charged enactments in which patient and analyst’s inner worlds are deeply entwined. From this perspective, I understand the patient’s “envious” attacks as efforts to penetrate and reach painful and dissociated areas within her analyst in order to heal and grow.

• bidirectional
• destructive
• enactment
• envy
• intersubjective
• libidinal
• refused identifications

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amy Schwartz Cooney

Amy Schwartz Cooney, PhD, is on faculty as instructor and supervisor at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies and the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies. She developed and chairs a Comparative Psychoanalysis Project at the NYU Post-Doctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She has written and presented on reparation, chaos, and mourning and growth in psychoanalysis. She is in private practice in New York City.