Jealousy and Envy ─ New Views About Two Powerful Feelings

Jealousy and envy permeate the practice of psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic work. New experience and new relevance of old but neglected ideas about these two feeling states and their origins warrant special attention, both as to theory and practice.

Their great complexity and multilayered nature are highlighted by a number of contributions: the very early inception of the "triangular" jealousy situations; the prominence of womb envy and hatred against femininity rooted in the envy of female procreativity; the role of shame and the core of both affects; the massive effects of the embodiment of these feelings in the conscience (i.e., the envious and resentful attacks by the "inner judge" against the self); the attempt to construct a cultic system of sacrifices the would countermand womb envy by an all-male cast of killing, rebirth, redemption, and blissful nourishment; and finally, the projection of envy, jealousy, and their context of shame and self-condemnation in the form of the Evil Eye.

Taken together, the contributions to the stunning and insightful volume form a broad spectrum of new insights into the dynamics of two central emotions of rivalry and their clinical and cultural relevance and application.

Leon Wurmser, M.D., Ph.D. is a supervising and training analyst NYFS, and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, University of West Virginia.

Heidrun Jarass, M.D., is a general practitioner working as a psychoanalyst in private practice. She teaches and is a training and supervising analyst at the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Nuremberg of the German Psychoanalytic Society (DPG), vice president of the board of directors of the Nuremberg-Regensburg Psychoanalytic Society, since 2004 a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association, and on the larger board of the German Society for Psychotherapy (DGPT).