reading

Preface

Envy is an emotion we all know about, scholars, psychoanalysts, and theologians included, but we rarely talk about it, and very little is written about it. The reason for this silence is the painful, searing effects of envy. It burns into us like acid, whether we are the envied or the envying.

But envy really does exist and work its destruction, all the more successfully because we refuse to face it. In essence, envy is an attack on being – the being of the envied and of the envier, too – and an attack on the good quality or stuff that is envied. Unimpeded, envy would eviscerate everyone and everything, leaving nothing but shells. Then, perhaps, its own envious clamoring could rest, but only as long as nothing appeared to activate its venom anew.

If we refuse to talk about our experiences of envy we conspire with its savage attempts to annihilate the good, anything that is in any way good, however we define it. For finally, envy between persons is a displacement of our own relation to the good. When Cinderella’s sisters envy her, they get off the hook of their struggle with themselves and their relation to the good. They dodge trying to relate to their own selves by means of noisy accusations directed against Cinderella. They avoid figuring out their relation – to their mother, to the prince, or to what they see as the good life. Instead of inspecting and muddling along in these real relationships, they mount vociferous attacks on Cinderella. All the sisters’ energies go into trying to destroy Cinderella’s being instead of trying to take hold of their own, sexually and spiritually.

If we can suffer consciously the envy we ourselves feel, whether coming from us or at us, it can be a means of recovering being for us. Envy can lead us to what needs repair in our identities, in our sexuality and our spiritual centers, and in our efforts to relate to the good. And envy can point us toward the very good that undergirds both the pain and the healing. Envy, so spoiling and injurious, can, if suffered consciously, point us toward the good we thirst for. Envy, that great distance maker, that connection destroyer, can, if suffered consciously, close the gap that its own wounding operations have opened.

We wrote this book to open up this wounded space in human relationships. The Cinderella tale, so simple and so profound, offers a direct road into and through the thickets of envying and being envied. Envy between sisters, between mothers and daughters, between the sexes, between nations; inwardly, between different parts of our own psyche; envy even of God – these are the multiple places of wounding we touch in this book. The central role of envy in determining the very nature of our society – its politics, for example – is, we think, crucial.

The first part of the book explores envy psychologically, what it feels like to be envied and to envy (Chapters 1 and 2); the archetypal background of envy found in relation to the mother (Chapter 3); envy between the sexes (Chapter 4), and the envy that attacks the good itself, the very thing that envy longs for (Chapter 5). We use the Cinderella tale to approach and address these tortuous emotions, taking her and her sisters as two sides of the same envy complex that exists in most of us. Recognizing that in each of us are both sides of the envy drama leads to specific steps to treat the problem (Chapter 6).

The second part of the book explores envy theologically, recognizing that envy has been seen as a major sin through the ages (Chapter 7). It affects our spiritual integrity (Chapter 8) and has specific consequences for our sexual identity, too (Chapter 9). Through Cinderella, whom we see as a kind of female Christ figure, we catch a glimpse of the plight of the good – in theological terms, of God – when in our envy we refuse it and take offense at it (Chapter 10). What solace, then, offers itself to those who suffer the scourge of envy? The answer is in the good itself, which moves us to look at it through the very envy that would attack it (Chapter 11), to go with its little bits and pieces, willingly trying to fit them together into a larger whole of self and community (Chapters 12 and 13). We conclude with a look at the amazing nature of goodness that may gradually become evident in the envy experience, its abundance, its ability to link and make wholes of disparate parts, its abiding presence, and its joy (Chapter 14).

A glossary of terms and a brief review of the psychological literature on envy conclude the book.

We would like warmly to acknowledge the irreplaceable skill and helpfulness of Staley Hitchcock in typing the manuscript.

Ann and Barry Ulanov

Woodbury, Connecticut

Introduction

The story of Cinderella and her sisters endures as no other fairy tale does. For most of us it is alive in Charles Perrault’s late seventeenth-century version, complete with stepmother, fairy godmother, mice, pumpkin, glass slipper, and rescuing prince. For others, there are tellings that reach back in time as much as a thousand years and across the world from the Indians of North America to the peoples of Africa and China. The variations are many, the emphases different, the central figure sometimes not so pure as Cinderella in the more than seven hundred attempts to tell this tale.

Why should this story attract so many tellers, capture so many readers and listeners? What is there about it that cuts through major differences of time, place, and culture? There are other attractive heroines. There are other cruel stepmothers and ugly sisters to bring alive the perils of family life. Rescuing princes abound and if other godmothers, or ingenious animals, or talking fish, or enchanted forests are not necessarily so resourceful as Cinderella’s, enough magic exists in the world of fairy tales to provide contentment to an audience hungry for happy endings magically contrived.

None of these things accounts for the hold of Cinderella upon our imagination. Rather, there is something primordial about Cinderella and her tale. Seated in her nest of ashes, she speaks to us of misery in archetypal terms. She is, with whatever degree of natural or supernatural significance we may want to endow her, the Suffering Servant. What is more, she not only serves hard and cruel masters – or more precisely, mistresses – but does so as one called to better things, by inner and outer nobility, by blood, and by spirit. She is, in fact, so much the very essence of the noble that we can accept the fact that she is an enviable creature, and is envied, by her stepmother and sisters, even in her condition, down with the grease and dirt, doomed to endless service and suffering.

The story of Cinderella is the story of envy. It is the epochal tale, even in its usual few pages, of this much-felt, much-endured, but scarcely discussed human emotion. Accounted by tradition second only to pride of the so-called seven deadly sins, envy remains on the outskirts of religious, philosophical, literary, and psychological discourse. It has its place in moral theology and philosophical ethics, but not one commensurate with the stern and nasty language used to describe it and to cast it from the precincts of proper behavior. It has a significant book unto itself in sociology and a few articles in anthropological journals. It gets occasional attention from political scientists, but rarely is any attempt made to understand or explain its pivotal role in motivating events as large as revolution or as shattering as family violence. It has its brief innings in Dante, in John Bunyan, in medieval and Renaissance epic, in some few modern novels, but it lives, even in its most brilliant evocations, only for a moment, personified in such ugly trappings that it is easy to dismiss from consciousness.

Where envy survives – and oh, how it does! – is in human affairs, in little ones and big ones, in major and minor events, but most importantly in the ordinary daily lives of ordinary people, in all of us, one way or another, as enviers or envied. However badly or well we enact the roles, we are called upon at some time or other to play Cinderella or her stepmother or stepsisters.

Freud’s deliberations on penis envy have made that phrase a commonplace in our time, and the matching compliment paid the other sex in later psychological theory with envy of breast or vagina has begun to make its way into something like universal conversation. But neither kind of yearning for missing sexual anatomy or function has quite established envy at the center of thought or investigation in depth psychology, though Melanie Klein did find in envy a clue to major truths about human behavior, and did see envy as a constant factor in our lives.

Klein’s investigations and all the work done on envy begin from the point of view of the envier.1 We propose to start from the experience of being envied. This departure brings new light to the complexity of envy – both its miseries and its hidden values – and illuminates more of the archetypal background shared by the envied and the envier.

What happens to one who is being looked at enviously, with the fierce scrutiny and malicious intent that the root meaning for envy – invidere or invidia – conveys? How does envy appear to Cinderella, the envied one, the object of her sisters’ eviscerating examination? What does being envied tell us about the dynamics and effects of envy? What archetypal issues relating to the good confront us here? How can we respond to envy, whether it comes at us or from us? What insight does psychotherapy give us to help us to deal with envy?

Cinderella and her sisters show us the energies of envy – its vicious attack, its determination to spoil all it confronts, its refusal of the good at the same time that, in secret, it spies on the good. The emphasis in Cinderella and her sisters is on envy between women, but the archetypal themes of the tale serve as a means to interpret envy in men as well, envy toward women and toward the feminine elements of their own being. In addition, Cinderella and her sisters represent central aspects of the female personality, and especially the conflict between ego and shadow.

Our interpretation of the tale, therefore, will move back and forth between internal issues: how our own feminine and masculine parts fit or do not fit together, and external issues: how we conduct our life with persons of the same and opposite sexes, how we conflict, compete, or join harmoniously with others. First and foremost, however, we must enter into the awful places where envying and being envied rule. For there, where all of us are bound to spend some of our lives, we will find the reasons why envy is so little dealt with and why it is essential to face it.

1 - Being Envied

To be the object of envy is a terrible experience. We know that from our earliest reading. Whether it comes in the form of the scheming plots of Snow White’s stepmother to kill the beautiful child, or the sadistic demands of Cinderella’s sisters, designed to humiliate her, or the determination of the two sisters in the fairy tale “One-Eye” to take all the food for themselves and leave their long-suffering sister to starve, envy makes the misery of others its devoted aim.

One who is envied feels the attack of envy as nullification of her own subjective reality. She is turned into an object by her envier, whether by praise or scorn. Her reality as a person is obliterated. Her hurt, her anger, or her shock in response to envious assault seems not to matter at all to the envier. Any facts of her personal history are utterly discounted. That Cinderella, for example, is also the much-loved daughter of a shared father, or that she has suffered the loss of her beloved mother, arouses no sympathy in the envious sisters. Or, to take an example from analytic practice, when a woman, envied by her sister, protests that she too has problems to overcome and that she has worked hard to achieve the good position that is now the target of her sibling’s envy, she is met only by the stony face of her envious sister.2 These facts in her own history make no dent in her sister’s envy; they are simply not taken in. The envied one no longer exists as a valid subject. She is changed into a thing, a mere object of envy. She exists only with reference to the envier’s idealization and persecution, typical defenses against the pain that comes with envying.

In idealization, the envier inflates the envied into one “too good to be true,” one so far beyond the envier, and in fact all human proportions, that the envier need not feel maliciously competitive. The envied one is turned into a demigod and coerced into accepting that role. In persecution, the same defense mechanism operates, only at the opposite end of the scale. Now the envied one is seen as completely bad and as aiming above all else to make the envier’s life miserable. The envier then need not deal with her own envying because it is projected onto the envied one, who can then be blamed for it. The cause of envy lies not in oneself but in the envied one; accusation substitutes for self-examination. In both idealization and persecution, the envied one is turned into an abstraction – hero or villain – and robbed of concrete identity.

Envy generalizes. It blanks out persons in favor of qualities, and even those are not the particular qualities possessed by individual persons but part of a generalized ideal denied the envier by the mere fact of possession by the envied. Here begins that terrible mixture of pain and pleasure which envy always brings with it. The envier may take some pleasure in accounting, finally, for the misery felt in his or her lack of something. But there is great pain, too, not only the original anguish, but a new one. For the immediate effect of turning someone else into an abstraction is to do the same to oneself. One has moved from one’s own special case into the great gulf of generalization, where there are no persons but only great frightening qualities.

From the side of the envied one, to be envied is a threatening experience. One feels canceled, no longer validated by reference to one’s own particular identity, one’s own motives or feelings. All that matters now is the perception of the envier who sees the envied one only in terms of the role he or she plays in the envier’s personality. The envying sister in the case example above complained that if her sister did not always look so nice and do so well, then she would feel better about her own self and not feel so inferior. In the face of this attitude the envied one feels cut off at her roots, severed from personal connection to the resources of her own being. Her being fully alive and growing is taken as an intentional doing against her sister. She feels negated in herself and co-opted into another’s scheme of things. She is a country invaded and annexed by an enemy, seen now only in terms of service to this hostile neighbor who appropriates both one’s past and future by invalidating one’s autonomous existence in the present. The envied one really cares about relationship to the envier and is trying somehow to reclaim it, but she inevitably must fail. The envied one feels trapped behind thick glass where she can see the other person and be seen but what she says cannot reach through the thick wall of projection the envier has thrown up against her. In this setting, we all become things, mere objects.

In personal terms, the envied experiences transmutation from subject into object as being utterly cast adrift. It is as if one has become a garbage can into which all the tainted stuff of the envier can be dumped. The envied one is reduced to the envier’s projections. Human relationship with the envier is blocked, any bond of sympathy or understanding severed.

This accounts for the second outstanding mark of being envied: utter helplessness. The envied one feels that the connection with the envier has been broken, hacked off as one might destroy a rope bridge. This leaves the envied one impotent, for the connection has been broken off from the other side and there is no way to mend it from this side. The envied one soon learns that any efforts to be nice will only intensify the break. Angry confrontations are taken as justification for grudges. Efforts to understand are labeled as patronizing. Showing the pain caused by the envious attack is met by an ungiving hostile silence. The envied one is clearly being perceived through a distorting lens, so any reparative gestures must appear lopsided and wrong. The envied one is left dependent on the envier to fix the break, something the envier clearly does not want to do. Cinderella’s sisters scorn all her efforts to reach them.

The envied one comes smack up against the limits of his or her power to do anything to mend the break or reopen the relationship. The envied has run into a wall with no opening and no way around it. He or she must just accept the wall, and stop trying to get over it. The envied one is powerless against the assault of envy. Such helplessness may cure the envied one of all remaining shreds of omnipotence, but it also will undermine any realistic sense of power to do something or to be someone of consequence.

To be envied is to be attacked. That is the third mark of the experience. Not only is one violated by being made into an object, cut off, and helpless; one is also actively persecuted. The response is anger and fear. One feels under threat of being robbed, not only of specific advantages or attributes one may possess, but in some uncanny way of one’s very substance. To the envied one, the envy defies causality, and takes on a tinge of madness. After all, what did one do to provoke this awful malevolence? One did nothing against the envier, did not try to thwart, oppress, or malign the other. Often, in fact, the envied one is a source of help, friendly interest, or active support to the envying. Cinderella cooks, cleans, and sews for her sisters. All the more astounding then is their sudden burst of active malice.

Helmut Schoeck, in his sociological study of envy, makes the same point about the envy shown by undeveloped countries to those countries which have acted as their benefactors. Generosity has aroused ingratitude and hateful resentment, because the lavish giving seems to demonstrate the giver’s superiority. Logic fueled by envy can reach so far as to reason that something must be basically wrong or unfair about Western society because life is so good there. Rather than receive, envy wants to destroy the giver, pushing for a leveling down so all will be equally miserable. Schoeck quotes Nietzsche: “If I cannot have something, no one is to have anything, no one is to be anything.”3

If the envied can avoid being overwhelmed by defensive expostulation: “What did I ever do to you?” “Haven’t we been your great supporters?” or by urges to persecute the envier in retaliation, an extraordinary fact will emerge: the very existence of the envied is the problem. The target of envy’s attack is not one’s doing, but one’s being. Cinderella, for example, owns nothing but her work and the attitude with which she approaches it. But her sisters envy her even that. Owning much but doing nothing, they envy her way of being and going about things. They aim to take it out of her, to disembowel her spiritually, so to speak. Seated in her ashes, going cheerfully about her duties, dressed in rags, the suffering servant has an unmistakable allure about her that the envious sisters clearly lack. Somehow they must remove it – which is to say, must remove her. This life-attacking attitude of envy shows most painfully when a parent envies a child, seeing in the child’s eager young existence something the parent lacks. It may be a particular talent, physical beauty, or simply the child’s youth, its new life.

The envied one often feels stunned at this revelation that his or her being is the problem to the envier, and feels even more helpless to do anything as a result. For what is there to do? Like a victim of racial or sexual prejudice, the envied feels an essential self is under attack, not some fault or virtue that is changeable or detachable from one’s central identity. Instead, one’s very hold on life, one’s connection to the good, is the problem.4 As a result, hurting envious action is experienced as all the more senseless and without cause. Worse, the envier’s touch of venom toward the envied reveals a hostility to good itself.

The envier wants to damage, to degrade, and, in Klein’s now famous words, to spoil the goodness of the envied one. Cinderella is exactly as sisters and stepmother want to see her, dirty from the muck of her chores, shabby in rags, deprived, and clearly not worthy to go to the ball. They want to push onto Cinderella their own disfiguring envy – one version of the tale is called “Scar face” – projecting onto her their life-spoiling envy. Thus, they put Cinderella in the death place, among the ashes.

The spiteful effects of envy appear everywhere. Political efforts to destroy benefactor countries result in a hollow triumph for envy. No one gets anything; everyone feels attacked and cheated. Parents who envy their child know the specific torment envy brings: it maims the thing they love. The robbery of being is the ultimate effect. The envying try wildly to gather being up and run off with it, a person’s, a group’s, a nation’s. Failing to do so, they will attack it, vandalize it, so that it is wrecked and of no use anymore to any one, least of all, they hope, to the envied.

The person who is looked at with envy’s intensity must beware, for temptations lie on all sides. The blast of envy brings many aftershocks, any one of which can knock over the envied. Pain comes as the first shock. Envy wounds. The envied one falls into the pool of victimization, thrashing around in undeserved hurt. One may struggle to master the pain by self-accusation, making oneself the cause, taking responsibility for the other’s projections, denying the malevolence of the envying. Such omnipotence simply compounds the envier’s attack with self-attack. The envied may also yield to the opposite temptation, retaliating and persecuting in kind, hoping to expose to everyone how cold, unethical, and grasping the envier is. But this way the envied becomes the backbiter and malicious gossiper.

When the persecution infects the envied, an all-consuming rage against the envier turns in on the envied one, producing an equally thorough guilt. One woman said she felt guilty for being alive because her very existence provoked such unhappy envy in her sister. She wanted to cut herself down so that her sister could thrive. Indeed, she gave up certain activities that her sister found appealing, simply to leave the field open to her sibling. Either way, rage-filled persecution of the envier or of oneself only makes things worse. The poison of envy fills the soul of the envied one.

Withdrawal offers another temptation to the envied. One wants to hide and not tangle with such viciousness, somehow to secure a place safe from contamination. This quitting of the field often excites more attack from the envier, who wants both to preserve this confounding source of the pleasures and pains of envy and to wipe it out. Thus the envier moves in, either for the kill or with a compulsive frenzy to get some kind of more telling response from the envied one, violent if necessary. The envier cannot tolerate simple withdrawal. It feels to the envier as if the envied one were absconding with the good. It must be pursued, or at least dented. One woman caught in an envious situation at work tried to retire from the battle, only to find ugly signs posted on her office door.

An odd but not infrequent variation on the temptation to withdrawal is the envied one’s attempt to become entirely self-sufficient, to deny normal dependencies and needs for relationship, especially to potential enviers. The devilish thing about envy, however, is that most often it springs up in close relationships in one’s family or working life, from which one cannot withdraw. How then to deny reliance upon the other, whether co-worker, neighbor, sibling, or parent? The envied one seeks refuge from envy by no longer looking to the envier for anything, trying to become both provider and dependent, lover and beloved, teacher and learner, even, if necessary, male and female. This can sometimes result in a remarkable development of talent and splendid independence, but it will not last. Eventually, chronic loneliness, even schizoid isolation, will develop. The withdrawal will have ended where it started, in a diminishing of being.

But all this maneuvering to avoid envy only attracts more of it. The envied one who is successful in denying dependence on others makes the self into the enviable object par excellence. The envied one shows nothing that would contradict the idealization the envier projects, and thus arouses even more excited envy. To the envier, the idealized one seems to be intentionally hoarding the good and withholding it.5

The envied grow increasingly desperate, for nothing succeeds in warding off envy. If they renounce any hope of being seen and accepted as themselves, they are accused of being cold and aloof. If they try to share their good, they are attacked for showing off or being patronizing.6 If they try to defend by explaining, they are not listened to, for explanations will not fill up an empty envier. Even if some of the melodrama is lacking, they are in the position of hostages being held by terrorists. There is nothing they can do to appease their captors. Least of all do the enviers want to lose hold of the envied, to let the hostages get away.

Withdrawal from envy, whether from the envier or into oneself, meets a dead end, and frequently catapults the envied one into the opposite temptation: to try to do something to fix the break and reestablish contact. Simone Weil reminds us of how much evil is set in motion by hasty interfering actions.7 These efforts usually prove futile because in them the envied one begins from a wrong premise. Nothing the envied one can do will repair the break because it came from the envier’s side. Often efforts to help the envier are only attempts to ward off this blow to one’s omnipotence. In analysis, for example, an analyst can overinterpret on such occasions, trying to appease a patient’s envy by explanation. But such explaining (especially if correct!) pulls both analyst and analysand above the level of conflict, when what is needed is to get grounding in the envious emotion that exists between them. These efforts collapse quickly. The patient spits out all the forced food and the analyst gets fed up. What is more, the envier usually retaliates against such intrusive goodwill with an even more savage attack.

Goodness figures centrally in the last great temptation for the envied one: to deflect the attack of envy by altogether disowning the good that is the target of the attack. “That is not mine,” one says at such a point; “I don’t know about that; it doesn’t belong to me.” The envied one is saying, in effect: “I am no different from you. I do not have anything you would want. Why, I am really no better than you!” This refusal to own the good that belongs to one, indeed what one may have worked long and hard to reach, is a serious blow aimed at goodness, even at being itself. The result is more trouble for both envier and envied.

The envied one’s denial of the envied good threatens to remove all goodness from the scene. Jesus warns us about the fate of those who deny him: they too shall be denied. Those who will not use the talents given them will lose them altogether and be delivered into outer darkness. The snarling tangle that ensues between the envier and the envied is an all-too-graphic example of what that darkness can be like. The envier experiences the other’s denial of goodness as a deliberate hiding of the good in order not to share it.8 The envier’s frenzy of persecutory reaction reaches fever pitch. The envied one, in turn, suffers the misery of cowardice, knowing the pain of conscious shrinking from the truth, throwing it away in order to play safe. The envied one now feels a deep dread of the good, falling into the temptation to hold goodness itself responsible for the envious attack that has brought so much pain. How long can one feel pleased with something that brings such opprobrium on oneself? Wouldn’t it be better to be less talented, less virtuous, less subject to envy? If the good could just be abandoned, then one would be secure. Better to turn away from the good, pretend it is not good after all, or does not even exist.