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In everyday parlance, “envy” and “jealousy” are commonly confused or merged; indeed, “envy” tends to disappear from common discourse. Thus, “I'm jealous of her mink coat,” or “He's jealous of his brother's Mercedes.” Sexual jealousy appears, of course, in accounts of crimes of passion, and paranoid jealousy is accountable for much of domestic violence. The distinction, that is, between these intense, often profoundly troubling emotions seems to be the province of, on the one hand, literary efforts and, on the other, of psychoanalysis. It is the task of the present volume, assembled and edited by Leon Wurmser and his German colleague Heidrun Jarass, to clarify this distinction and to emphasize what they consider the central importance of these affects in both psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice.
In her brief introduction, Anne-Marie Sandler, like most of the authors of the ten papers to follow, pays tribute to Melanie Klein's emphasis on the role of envy in infant development, but then goes on, like Freud, to offer the established philological definitions of envy as arising from a two-person matrix and jealousy as an aspect of a three-person (or oedipal) situation. It will fall to some of the contributors to put into question the categorical nature of this distinction, as, for instance, does Wurmser in citing sibling rivalry as equivalent to oedipal rivalry in fomenting feelings of jealousy.