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Rafael López-Corvo advances his interesting concept of self-envy to explain, at least in part, some of the self-destructive behaviour, acting out, negative therapeutic reactions, addictive
behaviour and perverse transference of certain borderline and narcissistic personalities. He defines self-envy as ‘produced between an excluded part and a creative part of the self’ (p. 10) or, in more complex fashion, as
the envious attack by a part of the self, usually related to childhood self-objects, against another part of the self identified as a creative and harmonious mother-father or parent-sibling relationship, also within the self, which is now transferentially projected as a means of avoiding superego accusations (p. 24; quoting from his own article on self-envy in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 1992).
López-Corvo’s approach is basically Kleinian, though with many additions, alterations and terminological changes of his own. He bases his idea of self-envy on Scott’s 1975 paper, ‘Self-envy and envy of dreams and dreaming’. He also uses Rosenfeld’s idea of conflict between parts of the self in destructive narcissism (Rosenfeld, 1971), Meltzer’s ideas about tyranny (1973) and John Steiner’s work on perversion of the transference (1982).
I think that López-Corvo’s term ‘self-envy’ is striking and stays in one’s mind, though I think it is slightly misleading. I believe that he really means envy of or by an internal object; he uses the term ‘self-envy’ because he thinks of ‘self’ as comprising all the inner world. This perhaps comes about because of ambiguity in the meaning of ‘self’; sometimes it is used to mean the total personality, sometimes to mean a part of the total personality. Where Klein usually distinguishes between ‘self’ (sometimes called ‘ego’) and ‘internal objects’ in the inner world, I believe that López-Corvo does not do so consistently, and usually thinks only of parts of the ‘self’. I b