Frank John Ninivaggi - Envy Theory: Perspectives on the Psychology of Envy

This book introduces envy theory . It is a conceptual exploration of hypotheses and conjectures about the minds fundamental cognitive and emotional makeupits infrastructure and developmental potentials. Introducing the envy model and attempting to unravel the meaning of envy illustrates this orientation. Aims are to contribute to the psychological literature, improve patient care, and stimulate new research.

Envy theory addresses basic propositions about human psychology, consciousness, and the meaning of personhood. Challenging clinical work with children and adults in psychiatric contexts over three decades has provided the data for envy theory . It suggests a number of explanatory factors to make it socially interesting and of practical use, for example, as a research paradigm. Many aspects of envy theory await testability.

The significance of envy descriptively, developmentally, and as a typical state of mind, universal but dimensional in degree, in all psychological functioning is presented. Rather than being simple and discrete, envy is a diverse set of urges, emotions, and cognitions with a tonic presence that waxes and wanes over time and experience.

Envy theory is a complex and comprehensive analysis of the conscious and unconscious factors that result in the self-destructive manifestations of envy. Unmet needs and desires pressing on consciousness and fostering feelings of envy and the actions that result can seriously undermine psychic health. Endowments of envy, however, are not as bleak and unsparing as they at first may appear. An understanding of envy theory would be incomplete if its clinical significance were not recognized or underestimated. That significance pivots on the fact that, properly identified and managed, a healthy maturation of envy may occur from which successful advances both personally and socially may arise.

Envy theory draws from psychology, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and aspects of the humanities in constructing models of envy in the human condition. The task of understanding and attempting to explain human nature and mind is far too broad to use only a single perspective, especially since there is no bedrock to understanding. Each branch of knowledge studies a subset of reality that depends on a variety of factors studied in other branches. Scientific realism suggests that conjectures arrived at in one area often help in understanding other areas. Envy theory presumes an intrinsic orderliness in human psychology, the details of which are mostly undiscovered. Inductions from one class of factsfor example, psychoanalytic psychologymay be shown to coincide with inductions obtained from the study of properties emergent in other classesfor example, neuroscience. This suggested complementariness and agreement, in fact, represents a consilience across disciplines, creating a common, realistic, and orderly groundwork for explaining the yet uncharted depths of how envy exists in the mind. The author has found such a bold methodology essential to explain envy.

Unconscious envy is the primitive sensation and conflated feeling of privation, powerlessness, inferiority, and hostile distress coupled with the urge to rob and spoil in the face of advantages and their enjoyment existing elsewhere .

Envy is biting the breast that feeds. This is part of envys paradoxical nature. Ironically, envy cannot be taken personally. It is akin to a reflexive response to another based on the enviers idiosyncratic phantasy construals . In this sense, it is insular and impersonal.

Phantasied omnipotence (strivings toward exerting power) and a need to control are the pillars upon which unconscious envy stands. Power in all its connotations suggests holding great resources along with the authoritative force, strength, and ability to act. Envy and an underlying sense of powerlessness go hand-in-hand. Conscious recognition of envy, for example, resides in many folklore ideas such as evil eye and jinx. Both connote identifying something exceedingly good with the implication that this powerful talisman will contribute in some way to its spoiling and destruction.

The varied phenomena subsumed in the construct of power as played out in all human relations, from the intrapsychic to the interpersonal to the extended group, can be seen and described from different perspectives. Conceptually, power denotes sufficient force required to do work and the capacity to produce change and achieve outcomes. Power can also be defined as the ability to control, influence, or coerce others and environments by manipulating resources. Throughout envy theory , power is given its psychodynamic appellationnamely, the construct of omnipotence , the unconscious platform organizing all human power strivings.

In envy theory , unconscious phantasy (Isaacs 1948)how the mind experiences/pictures itselfrepresents information and its lived processing. It is largely though not entirely self-generated. In this book, this spelling of the term phantasy is used to differentiate it from conscious fantasy denoting, for example, imagination and daydreams . The idiosyncratic meaning attributed to experiences and, for example, the subjective feelings implied by the concept qualia used in formal psychology arise from the personally constructed matrix of unconscious phantasy.

The consciously experienced features of envy are often reflected in those who feel themselves or are seen by others to be insecure. People who feel insecure and inadequate always look outside themselves and compare what they have or feel they are with what they perceive others to be or to possessusually something ideal. Envy arouses questions about fairness and equal distribution of resources. Scavenging for hidden treasures and exploiting the acquisition of what is perceived to be free also imply underlying envy. Envy, in isolation, can be destructive to psychological processes; envy, recognized and intelligently managed, transforms and may spur admiration, emulation, aspiration, empathy, and developmental advantages the healthy maturation of envy . This is one of envy theory s principal themes.

Envy theory s focus is unconscious envy, the central theme of this book. Envious attitudes that are conscious may be benign (nonhostile) or contain willful maliciousness. Unconscious envy, difficult to capture empirically, however, ordinarily has malignant potential since its signature urges are primitive, robbing, and corrosively spoiling. On a conscious level, these correlate with invasion, ruthless exploitation, and scavenging the spoiled resources. Pain is felt when envy on any level is activated. The envier feels pain, but the person toward whom envy is directed feels perplexed. Surface actions mask the enviers unconscious aims.