While envy theory formulates basic propositions about human psychology, consciousness, and the meaning of personhood, it suggests a number of explanatory factors to make it socially interesting and of practical use, for example, as a research paradigm. Envy theory dynamics have roots in earliest infancy and so transcend conventional gender stereotypes. Yet, despite envy's genetic imperative, there may be important gender-based differences in the experience of envy as it develops over time.

Environmental tutoring significantly modulates envy's innate dispositional loading. As temperament and personality develop, envy becomes amalgamated in a variety of ways into one's character. Many aspects of envy theory await testability. Its value in clinical applications is yet to be explored.

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 proposed as constituting a primary and nuclear dimension of mind around which cognitive and emotional experiences organize from infancy into adulthood. Unconscious envy as an orientation module denotes the mind's ultimate dissonance default state.

From a metaphorical perspective, unconscious envy is akin to "biting the breast that feeds" and "poisoning the well." This is part of envy's paradoxical nature. Ironically, such unconscious envy cannot be taken personally; it is the mind's reactive default state. In its most primitive iteration, it is a reflexive response to another based on the envier's idiosyncratic fantasy construals. In this sense, it is insular and "impersonal." This virtual absence of empathy correlates with states of narcissism.

The discovery of the "mirror neuron system" (MNS) in the macaque monkey and in humans, for example, has contributed neuroscience correlates to what envy theory proposes as the biomental epistemological mechanism of knowing, projective internalization--identifying and understanding aspects of the environment based on their intrapsychic and intrabrain correlates with the external environment (4, 5, 6, 7). This relationship is characterized by simultaneity, not one causing the other.

Envy theory also has correlations in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Although envy dynamics are profoundly intrapsychic, they are embedded in interpersonal relatedness. The ramifications for social psychology are yet to be elucidated. Healthy survival (the healthy maturation of envy), for example, denotes both personal gain and gain for the other considered biomentally similar, a relation or kin. Constructs, therefore, such as "inclusive fitness" and "kin selection" have psychodynamic relevance in envy theory.

The significance of envy as a typical state of mind, universal but dimensional in degree, is posited. Indeed, rather than being simple and discrete, envy is a diverse set of urges, emotions, and cognitions with a tonic presence that waxes and wanes developmentally and chronologically over time and experience.

Indirect behavioral indicators of unconscious envy are suggested when one senses another to be disturbingly intrusive, acquisitive and withholding, and generally unhelpful. All self-undermining attitudes and behaviors are rooted in unconscious envy. Conscious recognition of envy, for example, resides in many folklore ideas such as "evil eye" and "jinx," as well as in expressions such as "bite the breast that feeds," "the grass is always greener on the other side," and "poisoning the well." Behaviorally, envy is the core motivating force behind defacing property and spoiling the pleasure of others. These connote identifying something exceedingly good with the implication of hostile spoiling and destroying the perceived source of goodness, not badness. In terms of learning, envy brings it to a halt (8).

Dr. Ninivaggi is currently completing a comprehensive text on the practical implications of his envy theory called Biomental Child Development: Perspectives on Psychology and Parenting.

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