Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

86 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ENVY
jealousy is biologically unavoidable (with the exception, perhaps, of the
youngest child) and is a very early experience.
The social function of sexual jealousy
Next to sibling jealousy comes sexual jealousy, which is connected with
it and may exceed it in intensity. But in contrast to the problem of sibling
jealousy, most societies have succeeded, thanks to the universal institution
of incest taboos, in eliminating at least enough sexual stimulus
situations within close groups to ensure the basic unit of human society,
the family. Murdock examined the nature and scope of the incest taboo
in two hundred fifty tribal societies. He came to the conclusion that
presumably only those societies (tribes) have survived, and thus become
the object of research, which had succeeded in producing, through their
rational and irrational beliefs on the subject of incest, effective inhibitions
that reduced to a minimum conflicts within the family.
No society has ever succeeded in getting along without the social unit
of the nuclear family (parents and children). Every attrition of that unit
weakens and endangers the whole society. As Murdock emphasizes,
however, there is no more destructive form of conflict than sexual rivalry
and jealousy. The incest taboo alone makes possible the co-operative and
stable family group. Without totally neglecting other causes, Murdock
places the functional theory in the foreground: both the interest of the
individual and the whole function of society demand internalized social
controls or inhibitions, supported by the strict norms of the culture
concerned which, from the start, prevent the feeling of jealousy at the
most critical points of interpersonal contact in a society. Murdock cites
Freud in support of his theory. From him he gets the fruitful theoretical
proposition that every social phenomenon as widespread and as deeply
imprinted as, for instance, the horror of incest, must have its origin in the
nuclear family. But Murdock's theory then goes beyond Freud's far too
simple Oedipus theory. For, after all, most of the Freudian mechanisms
and their products-projection, sadism, regression and so forth-are
rarely tolerated or encouraged by society. In the case of the incest taboo,
however, we have an inhibition which, without exception, is embedded
in valid forms of culture.
Murdock supplements Freud's theory with that of the sociological