The basic ideas presented here are being curious about, attempts to understand, and to strive to contribute to human betterment. In the biomental approach, You and I are "the world." All begins with the individual and his and her own world, then halos out to touch and influence others.
This essay is Part III of the series on Envy---Eastern and Western psychological perspectives. In this section, goals, strategies, and tools to achieve an adaptive modulation of innate envious inclinations are discussed. The term “gift” is used to suggest that envy, far from being a negative bias in the human condition, is a potential gift that can provide an opportunity to achieve substantial insight and self-change toward a higher quality of life. Gift in this sense emphasizes freely available dynamics inherent in the neurocircuitry of unconscious mental processes of knowing---the depths beyond logic. The “healthy maturation of envy” can emerge as the ability to experience greater and greater degrees of empathy---admiration, respect, and gratitude for oneself and others.
Its style is more clinical (personal) rather than scientific (impersonal) to bring the material to an experience-near position to the reader. It is also more descriptive rather than prescriptive since the biomental perspective fully acknowledges the impossibility of the effectiveness of “commanding” change whether to others or self. Personal change typically requires the help of a highly skilled practitioner well versed in the techniques of detecting, interpreting, and creating conditions whereby the participant changes. Real personal change is a mysterious, arduous, and lifelong endeavor requiring high levels of motivation over long periods of time.
All these ideas derive from the biomental perspective. Details can be found in my recent book, "Biomental Child Development: Perspectives on Psychology and Parenting" (2013). The Eastern perspective is elaborated in my earlier work, Ayurveda: A Comprehensive Guide to Traditional Indian Medicine for the West (2008). A more formal analysis is expounded in "Envy Theory: Perspectives on the Psychology of Envy" (2010).
This article will be in three parts: 1.) a brief review of envy theory, 2.) reasons why envy exists, and 3.) approaches to modulate raw envy toward the healthy maturation of envy.
First consideration: a brief review of the theory of unconscious envy
Etymologically, the term “envy” derives from the ancient Latin word invidia, “to regard maliciously,” “to see into.” In ancient Hebrew, the word envy is associated with the Biblical figure and name, Cain, the first-born son of Adam and Eve. It connotes “to acquire,” and “to expand.” These meanings set the tone of envy’s piercing, penetrating, malicious intrusion whose aim is to grasp, acquire, and grow in size. Power and control are powerfully implied.
The biomental perspective is derived from a unitary view of the fundamental oneness or integrated configuration of the body (e.g., neurocircuitry) and mind (e.g., envy). This synergy encompasses all that is material, all that is psychological. This relative distinction is based on the degree of perceived coarseness (physical body) or subtleness (mental) of what is being examined. “Biomental” is characteristically Western in terminology and may inadvertently seem to exclude the spiritual dimensions of human experience.
Spirituality, positively inherent in this perspective, denotes the human experience of feelings of awe, reverence, and gratitude for the mysterious intelligence at the heart of all that exists, yet transcends adequate definition and comprehension. A profound personal desire for improvement, repair, and higher quality of life is part of spirituality. Spiritual thus can be seen to entail cognition, emotion, and intuition in rarified form.
In the biomental perspective, emotions play a central role in modulating feeling, thinking, and behavior from infancy to adulthood. Unconscious envy is a primary envy. It is a narcissistic experience that arises in subjective, virtually spontaneous, ways. It always centers on the self, although it may seemingly include others in its complex scenarios. Unconscious envy is raw, unmodulated envy and has the potential to be malignant and destructive. Simple envy is not malignant, but rather a conscious feeling of liking something another possesses and wanting to gain it, typically with no harmful intent. This article focuses on unconscious envy. Unconscious processes, from a psychodynamic perspective, stay rebellious, throughout life.
What is Envy?
Envy is a composite experience whose cognitive dimension perceives and first grasps and interprets all things in a binary manner---almost as the polar opposite, a two-ness of mutually exclusive extremes. Unconscious envy, when raw, is potentially malignant because it experiences extremes as irrational idealizations---extraordinarily ideal or grotesquely yet attractively evil. These extremes evoke a bewitching and uncanny charm that attracts like a magnet. Sadistic, masochistic, and other destructive impulses can emerge when raw envy unleashes itself into fantasy and enacted behaviors (e.g., rape, murder, child abuse, and so forth). Psychoanalysts have long recognized the power of idealization by associating it with the concept of “omnipotence.”
Omnipotence (beyond monumentally powerful) denotes experiences that transcend all that is rational, logical, and fundamentally realistic. Those with “fanatical” ideologies and beliefs of being “special” often adhere to omnipotent beliefs that devalue and dehumanize the worth of others. Besides being powerfully overwhelming, omnipotence always aims for total control. All these experiences begin in fantasies that have omnipotent and unbridled dimensions. If these cross the boundary and are translated into enacted damaging behaviors, they are typically psychotic and highly self- and other-destructive. Grotesque examples, other than the generic ones alluded to above, are not given here, but current events in real time are replete with material examples.
As omnipotent envious processes bubble up to more conscious awareness, painful personal feelings are aroused. This simultaneously evokes deep unconscious feelings of incompleteness, inadequacy, and a desire for “more” goods than one believes one has. The envious perceiver always feels the aura of such deficiency and inferiority and wants to know more, to have more understanding, and to be rid of feelings of incompleteness. Incompleteness is felt as being bad and powerless. The root of all this is the ever-present feelings of helplessness all of us experienced in infancy and childhood.
“More” equals “goodness” yet in a distorted powerfully destructive way. The key to a primary envy is that the envier is unable to share in constructive dimensions of goodness that are available to be shared. The envier cannot tolerate this sense of “emptiness” and typically spoils or destroys what is perceived as constructively good, making it unavailable to him or herself. This irony is an irrational paradox but is the essence of primary, unconscious envy.
Thoughts and behaviors are prompted in directions to alleviate the experiences mentioned above of distress, uneasiness, dissonance, and incongruence because of being incomplete. Feelings of frustration arise only secondarily. If they reach intense levels, mixed impulses of anger, spoiling, and destructiveness typically follows. For example, defacing property suggests the spoiling expression motivated by envy. It is always difficult to feel inadequate and deficient without feeling distressed and anxious. Attempting to remedy this entails avoidance, denial, and a variety of defenses.
Common and clear-cut emotional defenses against envy are greed and jealousy. When unconscious envy is stimulated, it bubbles up into more consciously aware feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, and even unfairness. Many defense mechanisms use projection onto others to help decrease narcissistic injury and pain. These feeble attempts rarely work. Others are perceived as more fortunate and even favored while the one suffering from envy feels entitled, yet unfairly deprived. This discrepancy leads to greater frustration and more anger. Often, attempts to spoil (e.g., blatant robbing, breaking windows, even subtle and cunning exploitation of the unwary) the perceived “riches” of others occurs both intentionally and inadvertently.
Second Consideration: Why Does Envy Exist?
The biomental perspective asserts a unitary point of view concerning the human condition. Everything in mind influences everything else; this also applies to processes within the body, and to the interaction of body-mind. Unconscious envy is given a primary role and has both cognitive and emotional dimensions that influence motivation and behavior. In a fundamental sense, nuclear envy is the basis of both desire and motivation.
Malignant envy is wild desire, what in Eastern perspectives is believed to be responsible for suffering. When envy is modulated and matured, it empowers life-positive impulses toward knowing, emulation, learning, admiration, feelings of gratitude, and empathy.
Cognitively, envy acts to facilitate knowing and to gain knowledge. As mentioned earlier, unconscious envy in information processing initially evokes a differentiation into two-ness. Operationally, contrasting differences and highlighting features of what one is considering are enhanced. Almost instantly, a mental choice is made to grasp an element and examine it more closely. This process then repeats itself until the object under consideration is “understood.” As cognition occurs, parallel emotional neurocircuitry activates so that “feelings” give emotional tone and reinforcement to “ideas” making them understood even more clearly and remembered over time.
Emotionally, when raw envy is modulated, ideas emerge that evoke empathetic impulses to admire, to emulate, and to experience gratitude. These complex configurations lead to the gradual development of feelings and cognitions of developing empathy.
Empathy is the ability to grasp another’s feeling state and appreciate the reasons behind these; typically, these are communicated back, and then the one listened to acknowledge the feeling and being “understood.” Envy, therefore, when healthily matured, exists to ease knowing, learning, acquiring knowledge, and developing a sense of admiration, emulation, gratitude, and developing empathy.
Third consideration: Goals, Strategies, and Tools to Modulate Envy
While the following discussion addresses practical strategies that aim to manage envious experiences, it must be emphasized that the of discussion here revolves around the conscious tip of a profoundly deep iceberg. The depths of unconscious envy are, in part, beyond mere intellectual analysis, brief descriptions, and any formulaic or manualized instructions. Significant character change requires persistent motivation and depth psychotherapy over time with a qualified practitioner well versed in the psychodynamics of envy.
A qualified practitioner denotes a real-time interaction with either a Western therapist or an Eastern guide. The latter has been the role of the “guru” for millennia. Envy is well known in the East and ordinarily subsumed under the heading of “desire” and believed to be the primary root of all human suffering and discontent. Here, we restrict ourselves to the psychological dimensions. Religious traditions use means appropriate to their particular viewpoints.
The present discussion, useful as it may be, can only be viewed as a prelude that introduces some relevant themes in a shorthand fashion. It is worthwhile, if just a preliminary endeavor at self-analysis, for one who is motivated and attempts to be introspective.
The Healthy Maturation of Envy Becomes Empathy
The healthy maturation of envy is the developing capacity for empathy. This outcome may be achieved in the following ways. When speaking of temperament and personality styles, four domains are conventionally recognized as valid in academic psychology. One must, however, acknowledge that human psychology is infinitely variable and cannot be definitively categorized. These groupings give some semblance of large clusters that are practical and merit understanding this complex topic.
First, one must assess and understand to what degree one possesses each of the four fundamental domains of basic temperament. These hardwired constitutional dimensions are harm avoidant, novelty seeking, reward dependence, and persistence. Everyone has a part of all four domains, but only one or two predominate. These may be present and discernable in the first year of life and stay after that. This self-understanding helps to grasp a glimmer of one’s automatic emotional response and possible motivational style.
Harm avoidance denotes aspects of one’s level of fear, anxiety, and reactive avoidance of situations perceived as dangerous. "Novelty seeking" means levels of one’s desire for new and exciting experiences, notably with the expectation of their being very pleasurable. Reward dependence (Affiliative, Seeks Relationships) denotes one’s general sense of being pleasant, agreeable, respectful, kind, helpful, positive and cooperative in interpersonal relationships. Persistence means the ability to maintain task achievement in a steady, determined, and enthusiastic manner over time.
Second, one must assess and understand his or her personality style. These begin to take shape around age four and are crystallized by adolescence to endure throughout life. They are integrated with temperament. It is believed five fundamental domains comprise personality. Each person has features of all domains, but only one or two domains are outstanding. Understanding one’s personality style also facilitates some insight into motivation, behavioral choices, and interpersonal relationships. The fundamental areas are the following: conscientiousness, agreeableness, negative emotions, openness to new experiences, and extroversion.
Conscientiousness means having an awareness of details and their follow through to completion. This strength encompasses traits such as being organized, responsible, reliable, watchful, efficient, dutiful, ethical, and having forward thinking. Agreeableness includes features of personalities that are kind, sympathetic, empathetic, affectionate, helpful, cooperative, able to relate easily, friendly, and compassionate. Negative emotions, sometimes referred to as “neuroticism,” includes moods that are described as nervous, anxious, worried, hostile, mean, irritable, unstable, labile, and highly stressed. Openness to new experiences denotes traits or features such as open-mindedness, problem-solving, creative, curious, inventive, and flexible. Extroversion includes being reasonably verbal, energetic, positive emotions, assertive, outgoing, self-directed, and gregarious.
Ways to Modulate Envy
Modulating envy requires consistent self-awareness and self-reflection. Having a basic understanding of one’s temperament and personality style helps in this endeavor. It is using metacognition—observing how one is thinking and feeling.
Extremes of thought or feeling show that polarizations are at work. If these suggest idealizations or gross devaluations, envy might be stirring. Beneficial temperamental features that modulate such extremes are 1.) reward dependence/relationship positive seeking and 2.) persistence. Beneficial personality styles that ballast the mind toward temperateness are 3.) conscientiousness and 4.) agreeableness.
The four character qualities mentioned above have or suggest a sense of mutually constructive relatedness to other persons. This denotes the ability to take the perspective of the other. It means to understand what and appreciate how another is thinking, and how he or she is feeling. This denotes empathy, which means a compassionate, respectful, and genuine regard for the value of another.
Envy always denotes a sharp differentiation between opposites ---something superior and something inferior. Interpersonally, this split is experienced as a devaluation and dehumanization of another person. Envy stimulates the desire to control one’s feelings of helplessness. Empathy counters this by evoking a sense of respect and admiration and leads to learning from others and emulating them. It is life-positive. Envious impulses when raw and unchecked are life-negative.
Perhaps, the highest form of the healthy maturation of envy is the capacity to experience gratitude for having received something good from another. Gratitude is expressed in helping---accepting help and freely giving help.
In Eastern traditions, a series of guidelines termed “Yama” that are, in fact, warnings toward modulating emotions, impulses, and self-destructive behaviors have a two thousand-year-old written history. These include the following: non-violence, truthfulness, not stealing, non-overindulgence, and a “detachment” statement that covers matters about desire, craving, hankering, lust, envy, greed, jealousy, and the regulation of sexual impulses and behaviors. Yogic “Yama” correlate with Buddhist “Shila,” the Eightfold Path to release from desire.
The biomental perspective regards all the above as true. Also, two further components are emphasized: 1.) stopping excessive talking---unnecessary “mental chatter,” and 2.) down-regulating expectations of fast pace, instant results. Silence can be a venue for meditative awareness. Slow paced, intentional action seen as "processes" over time can create experiences of “being in the moment.”
Summary
The aforementioned has attempted to summarize the vast theoretical basis of envy and ways it might be applied practically toward modulating its unmatured rawness toward a healthier expression. This expression can be found in experiences such as admiration, emulation, a sense of gratitude, helpfulness, and the capacity for empathy. There is a certain innate disposition toward having a low or higher envy constitutional load, and a lower or higher capacity for empathy. Environmental influences, however, such as parenting and modeling from others (e.g., siblings, children, adults, schooling, religious affiliation, culture, and so forth) and self-discovery pursuits have a substantial influence in facilitating or suppressing what is already present, even in potentia, and notably in introducing new learning.
Understanding and working with what is present in one’s character and in the environment to improve one’s quality of life is an exciting endeavor for those eager to search for personal truth.
Individual self-activism and self-improvement rather than protest improve group, social, and political structures.
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References
Ninivaggi, F.J. (2010). Envy Theory: Perspectives on the Psychology of Envy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Press.
