Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

GUILT AND SHAME 89
more persons, one or more of whom may be absolutely fantasized. Jealousy
is much more poignant and devastating than envy; in contrast with envy, it
does not concern itself with an attribute or an attachment, but, rather,
involves a great complex field of interpersonal relations. While data are
hard to get, apparently jealousy occurs frequently in adolescence .... 16
Again, Sullivan rightly recognizes the relationship between self-pity
and envy. Though he in no way sees envy itself as self-pity, the latter may
sometimes take its place. Self-pity may arise in the most diverse situations
in which a person already having a low opinion of himself may get
into difficulties. Self-pity eliminates envious comparison with others
which might endanger our self-esteem. 17
In his account of the phenomenon of resentment, Sullivan indicates its
psychosomatic components:
Thus resentment is the name of the felt aspect of rather complex processes
which, if expressed more directly, would have led to the repressive
use of authority; in this way resentment tends to have very important covert
aspects. In the most awkward type of home situation, these covert processes
are complicated by efforts to conceal even the resentment, lest one be
further punished, and concealing resentment is, for reasons I can't touch on
now, one of our first very remarkable processes of the group underlying the
rather barbarously named 'psychosomatic' field. In other words, in the
concealing of resentment, and in the gradual development of self-system,
processes which preclude one's knowing one's resentment, one actually has
to make use of distribution of tension in a fashion quite different from
anything that we have touched on thus far. . . . 18
Guilt and shame
Starting from psychoanalysis, Gerhart Piers distinguishes between feelings
of shame and feelings of guilt, both as regards their origin and their
dynamics, thus creating a pair of terms which enable him to distinguish
two kinds of envy. Of all the more concrete forms or states of emotional
16 H. Stack Sullivan, The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry, New York, 1953,
pp. 347 f.
17 Op. cit., 355.
18 Op. cit., 213.