Envy Theory

Envy theory describes a comprehensive model of mind advanced by child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist, Frank John Ninivaggi M.D., of Yale University School of Medicine. It is a conceptual exploration of hypotheses and conjectures about the mind's fundamental cognitive and emotional makeup--origins, infrastructure, and developmental potentials. Envy theory draws from psychology, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, neuroscience, and aspects of the humanities in constructing models of envy in the human condition. It advances the traditional "love-hate" paradigm and introduces its substrata of "love-envy" literacy. The envy model is a contribution to the psychological literature, better patient care, and new research.
While envy theory formulates basic propositions about human psychology, consciousness, and the meaning of personhood,
it suggests a number of explanatory factors to make it socially interesting and of practical use, for example, as a research paradigm. Envy theory dynamics have roots in earliest infancy and so transcend conventional gender stereotypes. Yet, despite envy's genetic imperative, there may be important gender-based differences in the experience of envy as it develops over time.
Environmental tutoring significantly modulates envy's innate dispositional loading. As temperament and personality develop, envy becomes amalgamated in a variety of ways into one'scharacter. Many aspects of envy theory await testability.The value of envy theory in clinical applications is yet to be explored.
Unconscious envy is the primitive sensation and conflated feeling of privation, powerlessness, inferiority,
and hostile distress coupled with the urge to rob and spoil in the face of advantages and their enjoyment existing elsewhere. Envy is proposed as constituting a primary and nuclear dimension of mind around which cognitive and emotional experiences organize from infancy into adulthood.
From a metaphorical perspective, unconscious envy is akin to "biting the breast that feeds" and "poisoning the well."
This is part of envy's paradoxical nature. Ironically, such unconscious envy cannot be taken personally, so to speak.
In its most primitive iteration, it is a reflexive response to another based on the envier's idiosyncratic phantasy construals.
In this sense, it is insular and "impersonal." This virtual absence of empathy correlates with states of narcissism.
The possibility of the healthy maturation of envy, a novel construct in envy theory, affords those dedicated to resolute self-change the possibility of its healthy transformation. The experience of "raw envy," in this way, morphs into more conscious and complex attitudes that include health-promoting admiration, emulation, and reciprocally beneficial gratitude.
Envy theory advances a complex and comprehensive analysis of the conscious and unconscious factors
that result in the self-destructive manifestations of envy. Unmet needs and nonconscious desires pressing on consciousness
can foster feelings of envy; the actions that result can seriously undermine psychic health. Frustration, disappointment, and unrealistic expectations typically recur as leading attitudes. Envy is at the root of jealousy and greed; malignant psychological attitudes and destructive behaviors connote underlying envy. Feelings of loneliness and anxieties accompanying aging, moreover, have roots in envy. Envy, in fact, is a prime stressor in everyday living.
Endowments of envy, however, are not as bleak and unsparing as they, at first, may appear.
An understanding of envy theory would be incomplete if its clinical significance were not recognized and therefore underestimated.
That significance pivots on the fact that, when properly identified and managed,
a healthy maturation of envy may occur from which successful advances both personally and socially may arise.
This leap into empathetic states of mind transforms "raw love" into a pragmatic capacity for intelligent loving.
It transcends self-destructiveness and promotes social advancement for both individuals and groups.
The political and societal ramifications, therefore, take on a guarded optimism.
Envy theory presumes an intrinsic orderliness in human psychology, the details of which are mostly undiscovered.
Inductions from one class of facts, for example, psychoanalytic psychology, may be shown to coincide with inductions
obtained from the study of properties emergent in other classes, for example,neuroscience.
This suggested complementariness and agreement, in fact, represents a consilience across disciplines
creating a common, realistic, and orderly groundwork for explaining the yet uncharted depths of how envy exists in the mind.
Such a bold methodology is essential to explain envy.
The discovery of the "mirror neuron system" (MNS) in the macaque monkey and in humans, for example,
has contributed neuroscience correlates to what envy theory proposes as the biomental epistemological mechanisms of knowing,
projective internalization--identifying and understanding aspects of the environment
based on their intrapsychic and intrabrain correlates with the external environment.
The relationship is characterized by simultaneity, not one causing the other.
The significance of envy as a typical state of mind, universal but dimensional in degree, is positied.
Rather than being simple and discrete, envy is a diverse set of urges, emotions, and cognitions with a tonic presence that waxes and wanes over time and experience.
Throughout envy theory, the psychological dynamic of "power" is given its psychodynamic appelation,
namely, the construct of "omnipotence," the unconscious platform organizing all human strivings toward control.
Phantasied omnipotence (nonconscious strivings toward exerting power) and a need to control
are the pillars upon which unconscious envy stands.Power in all its connotations suggests holding great resources
along with the authoritative force, strength, and ability to act. Power can also be defined as the ability
to control, influence, or coerce others and environments by manipulating resources.
Envy and an underlying sense of powerlessness go hand-in-hand.
In fact, some clinical expressions of intellectual limitations and academic difficulties may have significant components of envy.
In envy theory, unconscious phantasy (Isaacs, 1948)--how the mind experiences/pictures itself--represents information and its lived processing. The British psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein (1957) used this framework in first elaborating her seminal theory of primary envy. It is largely though not entirely self-generated, especially
since it is the mental side of the biomental self and modulated by the interpersonal environment of experience.
For example, dreaming, to some extent, reflects the operation of unconscious phantasy. Dreaming occurs in rapid eye movemnt (REM) sleep. Infants in the first two weeks of life spend 50% of sleep time in REM, from 3 to 5 months 40%, and from 6 months to 2 years about 30%. Adults spend about 20% of sleep time in REM.
Phantasy, according to envy theory, is the "mentalization" process unique to the humanization of the human biological organism.
Phantasy is unconscious thinking and feeling; it encapsulates interpersonal action scenarios.
In other words, it is the amalgamated container of desire, wish, and defense mechanisms.
The "stronger" the unconscious phantasy, the more one is likely to cross the line between thought and action, and so externalize the phantasy. Envy theory goes to great lengths to emphasize the healthy ego's ability to differentiate
the workings of the inner world, choosing among alternative courses of action, and the implementation of volitional behaviors
--reality testing and reality sense.
This spelling of the term phantasy is used to differentiate it from conscious fantasy denoting, for example, imagination and daydreams. Subjective construals (personally interpreted meaning) attribted to experiences and, for example, the subjective feelings elicited and implied in the concept "qualia" used in formal psychology arise from the idiosyncratically constructed matrix of unconscious phantasy.
Indirect behavioral indicators of envy are suggested when one senses another to be disturbingly intrusive, acquisitive and withholding, and generally unhelpful. Conscious recognition of envy, for example, resides in many folklore ideas such as "evil eye" and "jinx," as well as in expressions such as "bite the breast that feeds," "the grass is greener on the other side," and "poisoning the well." These connote identifying something exceedingly good with the implication of hostile spoiling and destroying the perceived source of goodness, not badness.

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