Rivalry, Envy, and Jealousy

The study of the role of siblings in early life led to an exploration of rivalry, envy, and jealousy, their differences based on the genetic source and the dynamic aspect of each. This paper focused on normal development and not on the clinical conditions in which rivalry, envy, and jealousy are part of trauma and pathology. I emphasized, as one of the positive contributions to development, that conflicts deriving from rivalry, envy, and jealousy, which are an expression of the interactions of all structural components, lead, within the normal range, to an increased alertness which facilitates comparisons and thereby promotes the differentiation of object and self. Such contributions

are neglected by those psychoanalytic theories of early development that are based on the dyadic mother-child relationship and exclude the role of the father, other caretakers, and siblings. A reduction of conditions of normality or pathology to the earliest years of life and to the dyadic relationship of mother-child fails to recognize the developmental pull that takes preoedipal conflicts and structures into oedipal and later phases and does not give sufficient weight to the integrative ego functions. An examination of rivalry, envy, and jealousy confirms the role of multiple objects in early life and its influence in consolidating the primary object representation on successive levels throughout development.