The Roots of Envy: The Unaesthetic Experience of the Tantalized/Dispossessed Self

Abstract

In this paper I suggest that no matter how omnipotent, destructive, or perverse the currents of entitlement and hatred are that envy coils around, envy often serves as a fig-leaf for desire—a psychic figuration of refused desire. This claim invites us to consider the vicissitudes of maternal subjectivity in order to understand the patient's unconscious envy. Whereas Klein's focused on the wish to spoil the good object or take something away from her, my emphasis is on the self and the archaic wish/need to feel at-one-with/the same as the object which, when not realized, can transform into destructive envy. This paper attempts to develop the following three claims: (a) the idea of lack, abjection and/or humiliation as a narcissistic precondition for unconscious envy; (b) envy as a phantasied, pre-emptive means of identifying with the object once normal identificatory processes have gone awry (Benjamin, J., 1988, 1995); and (c) the role of the analyst's subjectivity and unconscious communication in provoking or mitigating the patient's unconscious envy (Spillius, 1993)—specifically, the analyst's unconscious countertransference identification.

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Errata

Notes

The author wishes to thank Gail Bates, Ph.D., Charles Dithrich, Ph.D., Sam Gerson, Ph.D., Robert Oelsner, M.D., Thomas Ogden, M.D., and Annie Sweetnam, Ph.D., for their thoughtful comments regarding this paper. The agreements and disagreements each of them put forth were passionately felt, well argued, and gratefully received. And to my big and little owls hooting for me in the night.

¹During a discussion in Vienna, June 2006, Faimberg drew a conceptual distinction between a triangular form of exclusion, “Oedipal exclusion,” versus a two-person, maternal or “narcissistic exclusion” from the mother's subjectivity as part of her attempt to differentiate unconscious Oedipal logic and unconscious Oedipal experiences from unconscious narcissistic logic and unconscious narcissistic experiences.

²Like “perversion”, so with “envy”: both the signifier as well as the signified carry opprobrium (see Stein, 2005).

³ Mitrani (1993) turned the problem of envy in analysis on its head in making the astute point that the analyst is as dependent on the patient as the patient is upon the analyst since the patient has what the analyst needs to engage in her professional work. It follows that the analyst may, at times, have envious feelings toward the patient as the one who knows. As such, the analyst may unconsciously use projective identification to put her ignorance into the patient thereby ridding herself of an unbearable state of unknowing; “in this way we may be effectively rendering the patient deficient of experience, while re-establishing ourselves as the ones who have it all” (p. 251).

⁴ Spillius (1993) noted that Klein emphasizes the malignant or destructive aspects of envy; in contrast, Barrows (2002) distinguished what she refers to as “emulatory” envy from “destructive” envy. Shengold (1994) used the term “malignant envy” to refer to the most “primitive, regressive murderous manifestations of envy.” I have come to prefer the hybrid “wishful-destructive” envy to capture the amalgam of the wish to be like the object/other inherent in envy as well as the wish to spoil or destroy the other.

⁵Of course, this situation lends itself easily to projective reversal: the self's paralyzing anxiety about being the object of envy which, according to Harris (1998), is a common gender problem for many talented, self-destructive, ambitious women.

⁶A related issue revolves around the exalted status of the envied object: whether the object is theorized as first being idealized through splitting and projective identification (Klein, 1957/1975; Oelsner, 2006), or whether the object is idealized in the manner of any loved object to whom one wishes to surrender (Benjamin, 1988; Ghent, 1990), or whether it presents as a tantalizing object “not sustained so that to some extent the infant feels deprived” which Winnicott (1959/1989) said of the envied object.

⁷Controversy exists concerning the extent of the self-object differentiation required for envy. According to Joffe (1969), “the capacity to distinguish between self and object must have been acquired, and this capacity to recognize boundaries can be considered to be an ego function” (p. 430). Instead, I suggest that there are earlier stages of proto-envious comparisons that are themselves part of the differentiation/separation process and, as such, do not require the self's full separateness from the object.

⁸ Freud (1941) writes, “Children like expressing an object-relation by an identification: ‘I am the object.” “Having” is the later of the two; after loss of the object it relapses into ‘being’. Example: the breast. “The breast is a part of me, I am the breast.' Only later: “I have it”—that is, “I am not it” (p. 299).

⁹Thank God, it was not until after I finished writing this paper that I found and then sat down and read Joffe's (1969) thoughtful critique of the Kleinian concept of envy—otherwise my own envy may have paralyzed me! Among his bounty of ideas, he also posited a link between “a feeling of a massive fantasied disability of the self” and envy, and he suggested that “in analyzing such persons the basic problem is not the envy per se, but the sum total of all the factors that have become organized and integrated into a destructive inaccessible character trait” (p. 540).

¹⁰Klein (1957/1975, p. 181) quoting Jacques (1955) considered the etymological root of envy in the Latin verb invideo whose meaning includes “to cast an evil eye upon” or “to look spitefully into” to argue for the projective meaning of envy; she also noted Shakespeare's “green-eyed monster of jealousy” whose meaning, in context, comes closer to envy. More broadly, other idioms and cultural icons suggest that feelings of envy are experienced in the body: “The bitterness of envy” or “To bite the hand which feeds you” or the physical deformity of the character of the hunchback as the archetype of envy who forfeits love to nurse his grudge.

¹¹In a very compelling article, Laverde-Rubio (2004) also linked his views on envy to Klein's (1932) earlier views as he grounded envy in the experience of exclusion, feelings of injustice, helplessness, and blame cast toward a third party as responsible for the difference between self and other.

¹²After writing this paper, I discovered Morrison's (1989) excellent book Shame: The Underside of Narcissism in which he linked various shame-based states to narcissistic rage. Such states of narcissistic rage can also be linked to envious attacks leading to the speculation that so-called envious attacks might, in context, be thought of as states of narcissistic rage which are theorized as the outcome of shame-based self-states.

¹³ Ogden (2005) provided an example of being-with a patient yet needing to remain quiet for weeks. In the case he described, he reported that in remaining silent, he did not feel controlled by an omnipotent patient based on his understanding of what his patient needed from him at the time. Ogden's understanding was, in part, based on his containing-reverie of being with his own 3-year-old son during a nightmare and “becoming at one with him.” The reverie emerging during the patient's session led Ogden to intuit that this sense of oneness was what his patient needed from him as well.

¹⁴Charles Dithrich (2006), a consultant on this case, noted this emotionally meaningful shift in dream imagery and helped me interpret its possible meaning to the patient who responded positively through her “embarrassing” confession.

¹⁵To be sure, this idea of a homogeneous classical Kleinian perspective is partially a myth invented more often by opponents as a rhetorical strategy for expressing disagreements. However, to the extent that it remains valid to consider school-based ways of thinking about clinical issues, I think it is useful to try to condense the so-called classical Kleinian view as such.