You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The author states that there are diverse reasons for underachievement and reviews the attitudes of Freud, Abraham, and Mahler on the problem. The problem is traced back to primarily oral sources with morbid, destructive envy being the tangible result of the unsatisfied oral need. Examples are given of the envy
that shows up in therapy in various forms. The child may always have to do better than the therapist or teacher. He may provoke envy, and indulge in delinquency in order to provoke it. He may ridicule the therapist, or resort to silence. He may succeed in getting another child punished. All these are related by the author to the problem of envy. If morbid envy is manifest in a girl, she may resort to false praise of the very thing of which she is envious; she may lead the therapist out on a limb and then cut it off by adding a vital reality detail. The author has noticed that young children, because of envy of a younger sibling, may regress in the same area in which they had made most progress.
One observation that the author might have included is that the envy that patients of the same therapist have for one another is often associated with a strong homosexual component. This would agree with the author's formulation that envy originates from early stages of development and is a universal problem.