Response to Commentaries on “Libidinal and Destructive Envy”: More About the Evolutionary and Intersubjective Value of Lack-Envy

Abstract

In this paper, I respond to Amy Schwartz Cooney’s and Rachel Sopher’s discussions of my paper “Libidinal and Destructive Envy.” I argue that my reappraisal of the deadly sin of envy as being on the side of life and serving the self’s survival needs rather than originating in a putative death instinct by no means “takes the bite out of envy,” as Schwartz Cooney asserts. I also argue that Sopher’s view covers over the self-state of lack, which determines, at least in part, the course of envy. Moreover, whereas Sopher describes the main countertransference difficulty when working with a patient’s envy in terms of having to manage aggression while forcing the realization of our own inner demons, I suggest that the analyst has the even more difficult task of being the bearer of bad news: acceptance of the real world’s unequal distribution of desiderata. The paper also argues for replacing the one-person descriptor of “envy” with the two-person descriptor of “lack-envy.”

• acceptance
• destructiveness
• envy
• evolutionary psychology
• lack
• loss
• psychoanalysis

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julie Gerhardt

Julie Gerhardt, PhD, is on the faculty of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, where she is a personal and supervising analyst. She is on the adjunct teaching faculty for the Palo Alto Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Training Program and has published in child language journals as well as Psychoanalytic Dialogues.