Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

SIGMUND FREUD'S VIEW OF ENVY 85
anti-social character. It is his criminal envy, his intolerance toward single
members of his family along with his emotional fixation to his family which
cause the symptom of an apparent 'emotionlessness. '
A nineteen-year-old girl envies her younger brother, who had received
a greater share of her parents' attention. She wished she might be as
young as he and told of a dream in which she imagined herself back
inside her mother: 'I am in a bed with my brother. We have rolled
ourselves up like embryos. ' Gutheil gives accounts of several other of his
patients' dreams from which it is usually apparent that in waking life
inhibitions against work, or similar difficulties, are caused by envy of a
more successful friend, brother-in-law or sibling. 12
The material obtained from dream analysis does at least provide
evidence for my thesis that the feeling of envy and jealousy is experienced
and learnt primarily in the sibling group and that these feelings, on
reaching a certain intensity, have an exceptionally inhibiting and destructive
effect upon the personality.
Ian D. Suttie, a psychiatrist, in his book on the origins of love and
hate, speaks of 'Cain jealousy.' The need to control this he sees as
providing the ethical 'Leitmotiv' of mother-cults. This sibling jealousy is
the earliest and most powerful in the development of the individual.
Suttie also mentions primitive peoples, for example the Bantu, who 'take
elaborate measures to counteract Cain jealousy. ' He tells us that among
the aborigines of Central Australia, the mother eats every second baby,
sharing it with the older child. Suttie explains this as follows: 'Not only
can the child go on "eating the mother," but she even lets it eat the
younger baby. ,13 This use of cannibalism to attenuate sibling jealousy
recalls the custom recorded above in which, on the birth of another child
in the family, a fowl is beaten to death against the body of the older child.
Suttie emphasizes that sexual jealousy must be regarded as the main
source of all controls, whether these be social controls (taboos) or
endopsychic ones such as inhibition and repression. He sees Cain jealousy
as providing the most important motive for socialization: sibling
12 E. A. Gutheil, The Language of the Dream, New York, 1939, pp. 39,68,87,195,
212,228.
13 J. D. Suttie, The Origins of Love and Hate, London, 1935, pp. 107,110.