Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

THE ENVIOUS GUEST 337
he discovered that his basic feeling was desire to incorporate within himself
his host and all his belongings! He could not receive from his host that of
which he was envious and would steal (home, security, etc.).
Seidenberg then recalls widespread customs of various peoples, especially
of rather simple cultures. With them
it is extremely bad taste to admire a possession of the host. If the guest,
inadvertently or unknowingly, does so, the host is immediately compelled
to offer it as a gift to his guest. The origin of the custom may be postulated
on the recognition by the host of the guest's envy. To allay this envy and
possibly to prevent evil from becoming attached to the possession, he
presents it to his guest.
Seidenberg takes the analysis one step further:
Phylogenetically, the ability to be a guest required more emotional
development than that of being a host. It took far greater sublimation and
civilization for the guest, than for the host, to accept and play his role
without provoking anxiety in his host and in himself. So, if we can accept
the Jungian concept ... that the emotional development of the individual
recapitulates phylogeny, we find the answer for certain character traits
exhibited in the psychopathology of everyday life .... 7
I have met several times, in Europe as well as in America, the kind of
person so vividly analysed by this American psychoanalyst twenty years
ago. Probably this personality type can help us to understand the worldwide
rebellion of youth since 1966. As the 'envious guest,' Seidenberg's
clinical case, these young people lack the maturity to be the 'guests of
our affluent society.' The overprivileged youngsters, from California to
West Berlin, from Stockholm to Rome, strike out in senseless acts of
vandalism as a result of their vague envy of a world of affluence they did
not create but enjoyed with a sense of guilt as a matter of course. For
years they were urged to compare guiltily their lot with that of the
underprivileged abroad and at home. Since the poor will not vanish fast
enough for their intense guilt to subside, they can ease their tensions only
7 R. Seidenberg, 'On Being a Guest,' Psychiatric Quarterly Supplement, Vol. 23, Part
1(1949), pp. 1-6.