Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

84 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ENVY
sexual organs. It is a decisive assumption in much psychoanalytical
thinking. To me it seems astonishing, however, that writers trained, or
interested, in psychology should have allowed themselves to be so taken
up with mutual envy between the sexes over a small anatomical feature
as to pay not the slightest attention to the immeasurably greater role of
envy in the totality of man's existence. 10
The psychoanalyst Phyllis Greenacre speaks of a Medea complex
which she claims to have found in women who suffered in childhood a
traumatic experience consisting principally in pre-pubertal feelings of
envy, comparisons and anxiety relating to primary and secondary sexual
characteristics in both sexes. A basic situation especially conducive to
this experience was one in which another child was born into the family
of a patient, herself then not sixteen months old and therefore not yet
able to talk. The sight of the new-born child at the mother's breast filled
the little girl with unverbalized oral feelings of extreme intensity. Similar
jealousy can sometimes be observed in domestic animals on the
arrival of a new baby. 11
The duration and intensity of sibling jealousy in many cases are
recorded in a book by the psychiatrist Emil A. Gutheil on the language of
dreams. However, he tends to use the term 'envy' where 'jealousy'
would in fact be applicable. Thus he writes of a patient:
Contrary to his conscious state of mind, this patient offers dreams full of
activity, dreams carrying strong emotions, which however are of a distinctly
10 Cf. D. Wyss, Die tiefenpsychologischen Schulen von den Anfiingen bis zur Gegenwart,
2nd ed., Gottingen, 1966, p. 81. B. Bettelheim believes that' ... certain
psychological phenomena have not received the attention they deserve. Particularly,
penis envy in girls and castration anxiety in boys have been overemphasized, and a
possibly much deeper psychological layer in boys has been relatively neglected .. This is
a complex of desires and emotions which, for want of a better term, might be called the
"vagina envy" of boys. The phenomenon is much more complex than the term
indicates, including, in addition, envy of and fascination with female breasts and
lactation, with pregnancy and childbearing.
'Though this male envy has been recognized, it has received relatively little notice in
the psychoanalytic literature. ' Symbolic Wounds. Puberty Rites and the Envious Male,
1954, p. 99. Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude. A Study of Unconscious Sources,
London, 1957.
11 P. Greenacre, Trauma, Growth, and Personality, London, 1953, p. 233.