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I AM CONCERNED with the roots of an emotion which has many ramifications in later life and becomes attached to objects which are more and more remote from its origin. In borderline states where envy is most conspicuous it seems particularly important to get back to this origin as otherwise the patient's unconscious need to defeat the analyst, or any other helping person, will end in the triumph of the analyst's failure and the patient's pyrrhic victory.
Though envy is common to all men and has a positive social function in ideas such as ‘fair play’ and ‘equality of opportunity’ (Schoeck, 1966), envy has the worst possible reputation. A dictionary definition describes it as ‘pain excited by the sight of another's superiority or success, accompanied by some degree of hatred or ill-will, and satisfaction at his mortification … To regard with malevolent covetousness.…’
Envy is usually distinguished from jealousy by belonging to a two-body situation, whereas jealousy identifies the intervening third as the target. It is not surprising, therefore, that its roots belong to the nursing couple and to the infant's relation to its first object, the breast. There is a third in the background of most descriptions who is the one who enjoys the envied object, but in early infancy it is assumed that this is not an identifiable third but consists of contrary experiences of the same object which produce the painful excitement noted above.
I hope to show that primary envy on the archetypal level is envy of the creative functions of the mother archetype in her primary form as bisexual nature goddess. To me, the breast as the first representative of this figure lends itself to a bisexual interpretation, being both soft and round and the nipple hard with erectile tissue when stimulated. The envy of the creative has its counterpart in the fear of the deadly, devouring aspect of the mother archetype that is, of her envy of her creation and wish to re-incorporate it.