A Comparative Assessment of an Analysis of Envy: Commentary on Paper by Julie Gerhardt

Abstract

This discussion is introduced with emphasis on the need for comparative psychoanalytic studies in our pluralistic psychoanalytic world and describes an approach to such an endeavor. A very brief comment on the extensive literature review is followed by a more detailed focus on the “analysis of envy,” which gradually changed into the analysis of the patient, as a person. The discussant's “empathic entry” into the analyst's mode of listening and responding was simultaneously also applied to the patient's experience, to see how well patient and analyst communicated with each other and whether or not the patient indicated that she felt understood or not. When she did not feel understood, the patient signaled this with an intensification of her envy into furious “envy attacks.” The analyst's “decoding interpretations” implied that the patient was causing her own problems and should not feel the way she did. The analyst discovered this later herself. Her discoveries in the fourth year of the analysis yielded notable changes both in her approach and in the patient's progress. Ultimately, the analyst allowed her subjectivity to enter the analysis and became better amalgamated with her chosen theory, leading to the changes in a progressively more fruitful analysis.

Notes

¹Dr. Gerhardt's (this issue) three claims are “(a) the idea of lack or abjection as a narcissistic precondition for unconscious envy; (b) envy as phantasied, pre-emptive means of identifying with the object once normal identificatory processes have gone awry; and (c) the role of the analyst's subjectivity and unconscious communication in provoking or mitigating the patient's unconscious envy” (p. 267).

²This experience illustrates the validity of the hard-won recognition that contrary to Freud's early notion (now obsolete) that the analyst should be exchangeable behind the couch, if the analysis was to be a replica of a laboratory for the scientific study of how the mind works and not primarily a personally tailored therapeutic enterprise. In this new context we do not “analyze envy,” we analyze the person who is envious for good reasons of his or her own, understandable on the basis of the patient's past experience. And we attempt to understand these reasons in depth and thereby finding ways to respond that would ameliorate the patient's need to mobilize his or her envy in the current analytic situation.

³Renik, O. (2006). Practical psychoanalysis for therapists and patients. New York: Other Press.