1, 2, 3… what are we fighting 4 (envy & jealousy)

Something happens to the meaning of words as they drift through time. Two words have drifted in parallel, enlightening each other, and sometimes taking each other’s place: Envy and Jealousy. The word envy has come to mean something neutral, implying an admiration of someone or something and the wish to have it for ourself: I envy the rich man his lifestyle; I wish to emulate the success. Jealousy is still the ‘green-eyed monster’ of Othello – something demonic which inhabits us and burns up our moral selves. There is a transformation, an about-turn, in the meaning of these two words which points to a change in the conscious understanding of our desire in the world.

The word envy derives from the latin invidia, verb form invidere, which means ‘to regard maliciously, to begrudge, to cast an evil eye’. This is obviously far from a neutral wish to emulate. It is an active hatred; a wish to do harm. Similarly, the word jealous derives from the same latin root as zealous, implying an active, passionate rivalry which is retained in the use of the word today. We might glean from these definitions a glimmer of a distinction that is quite hard to discern and easy to lose, and it is not surprising that, now, definitions of one often contain the other, as if they are synonyms. But the original, clearer distinctions actually register something significant and probably fundamental in human nature: the difference between a relationship of two (a dyad) and a relationship of three (a triad).

Crabb’s English Synonyms of 1916 carries this distinction and expresses it elegantly: ‘Jealousy fears to lose what it has; envy is pained at seeing another have that which it wants for itself… [and]… sickens at the sight of enjoyment’. Jealousy, therefore, is in possession of something good, wishing to preserve it and fearing that a rival will take it away – it is a relationship of three, a triad. Envy wants what it doesn’t have, and focuses on the object as if it is withholding itself – it is a relationship of two, a dyad. You might recognise the play of these twos and threes as the stuff of the infant world and therefore of psychoanalysis; the infant dyad of mother and child, and the triad of the oedipal phase. Infant in bad relation to breast is envy; infant in bad relation with rival for mother is jealousy.

Melanie Klein used these definitions in her essay ‘Envy and Gratitude’ (1957) to help illustrate the dynamics of infant development. Developmentally the dyad is a more primitive form of relating and exemplifies a world of part objects (the breast) before whole objects (the mother; the father emerging from the mother) can be discerned. Envy is primitive in this way and it explains why Klein chose the word in its earlier meaning – ‘to cast an evil eye’ – rather than the word jealousy which is a relation to objects in relation to what is good. Jealousy wants to preserve the good in a primitive way by attacking the rival ‘intruder’; it is the infant’s position in the Oedipal triangle before, as Klein sees it, the part objects can be seen as belonging to the whole object (mother) and brought into relationship with each other by making reparation for the envious attacks.

It is interesting that, in the western world, envy has come to mean a valuable covetousness and emulation when it’s root is in primitive aggressivity. Could it be the playing out of Marx’s ‘commodity fetishism’ as an ideology of hate? The more we desire to consume the more we envy, and the possibility of a refreshing dose of jealousy is lost to us.

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