Envy This!

Envy This! is new to this forum.

Commonly thought of as an emotion, envy may be the most misidentified and mislabeled attitude that people commonly encounter.

Envy and jealousy are related but distinct.

This blog will discuss the differences between each with special attention to envy.

Envy is ever present in the human condition, but also typically hidden.

As will emerge in the course of this blog, envy, greed, and jealousy are akin to "the three musketeers." Put differently, these three emotions, attitudes, and behaviors are intimately entangled, and often appear together.

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What is envy?

Envy is a profoundly nonconscious state of mind, present at birth and grounded on the mind's default of grasping experience in "parts" (related to featural perception), and usually in a dualistic fashion. This sense of "two-ness" ordinarily has value attributions such as superior-inferior and good-bad. In earliest infancy, this apprehension is inchoate, amorphous, and really just felt as "a sense of." No cognition as far as thought activity such as logic and reason is possible. Noticing is emotional, and always polarized in feeling.

The complex infant mind operates using unconscious information processing. This encompasses mixtures of sensation and feeling. Mental content is iconic---images that are concrete and fleeting. Over time, the mind expands. Growth, maturation, and development add conceptual structure---probably during the last half of the first year.

So! What is envy?

Envy is the unconscious awareness of discrepancy and dissonance between self and "other" even though "other" is more a fantasy than a real person. The nuts and bolts of this "envy sense" is that something ideal is available (as when the infant nurses and is satisfied) but that it disappears and is replaced by distress, typically unbearable (such as hunger, coldness, gas pains, and so forth). Here is where the mother as primary caregiver comes in. There is no one else, but a mother for the infant to attribute these polar opposites to---"the ideal" versus "the horrible."

Envy is the infant's anxiety. The only solution at this time is the desire to delete its needs that cause pain by deleting the source--mother. Mother is the first object of raw love and raw hate.

This is the dilemma of envy--idealizing something so utterly good, not having it, and needing to spoil it out of existence. Of course, this is a precarious attempt that occurs and recurs throughout the lifecycle. Normal development and good enough parenting help mitigate the primary envy template but never eliminate it.

As we continue to discuss envy, this "two-ness" predisposition and emotional extremism will open up considerations of "the healthy maturation of envy."

When envy's discrepancies are mitigated, admiration, emulation, gratitude, and empathy arise.

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