Envy and Jealousy

Introduction

Envy and jealousy are complex and usually intertwined intrapsychic states. They are distinct both qualitative and in the contexts in which they arise. Envy is developmentally primary and is the matrix that fuses into more complexly developed jealousy-based configurations. Distinguishing them is difficult, especially since less obvious states of envy lie beneath more glaring states of the jealousy that overshadows underlying envy. Jealousy is always accompanied by some degree of envy (Wright, pp. 59). Envy, in contrast, may occur in the absence of jealousy. A rough schematic serves to illustrate significant differences.Discussion

Words, which convey similar meanings sometimes, come to be used interchangeably. In the case, of envy/envious and jealousy/jealous, though, the move seems to have been in one direction only; jealousy often used in place of envy but not vice-versa. Theodore Bernstein further points out that jealousy sometimes used, not merely in place of envy, but as a stronger form: “There, within a stone's throw of the sea, he makes his home and his description of how he does this makes one move from envy to downright jealousy” (Salovey, pp. 189). A human, and perhaps all-too-familiar, state of affairs, anyone who denies having experienced such a progression of emotion is either hopelessly out of touch with his or her feelings or a liar.

Envy is an attitude elicited in the subject by the perceived presence of another with whom the envier is not necessarily in love or strongly attached. The envier sees only partial aspects of the other as initially ideal and desirable, hence, superior. Feelings of gnawing privation arise. Although resentment builds at the realization of not possessing theses idealized and desired qualities, a greater desire to deprive the other and destroy what perceived to be advantageous becomes the overriding impulse. There is an attempt to spoil the envy-provoking object in some partial or more extensive way to mute envious dysphoria, which is usually quietly persistent. Destructive envy always acts to break social bonds. Envy promotes distance.

Jealousy, by contrast, is not dyadic but triadic. It is an attitude of the subject in the context of two additional subjects, one of whom ambivalently loved and desired; the other regarded in a horrible way because that other, perceived as more attractive, thought to possess, or be in the process of taking away, the desired one (Parrott, pp. 212). The jealous one's vehement fury made intense because he believes he once did possess both love and loved one he prizes, but now has lost both ...