Envy

Envy is the first work on that important ingredient of human experience since Melanie Klein's book in 1957. Yet envy has long been identified as the critical element in the negative therapeutic reaction and accounts for at least some of the difficulty in engaging the hard-to-reach. But what exactly is it that the haves have that the have-nots envy? The breast, the penis, generativity, wealth, position, power? After studying the individual qua individual and as a member of a group and community, Harold Boris reached the conclusion that there is something even more fundamental than these - that the basis of envy is life itself. Taking off from this thesis as presented in his previous books, Passions of the Mind and Sleights of Mind, Boris shows that to be living and to grow up, marry, mate and reproduce, can be almost entirely separate from feeling that one truly has the right to do so. There are those who feel authentic and meant to be and they flourish, and there are those who feel that their life and success is an imposture. The former feel alive, the latter hollowed out with dread and culpability. It is as if there is a right that some have and some don't: those who have it - or seem to - are envied by those who don't. Though therapy can help an envious person get better, it also carries the risk of such an increase in self-envy as to bring the treatment to a screeching halt, or worse. Boris shows how at least some of the panic resulting from the self-envy that can bring therapy to an impasse or a disaster can be averted by a careful restructuring of the therapeutic relationship.