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DEADLY VICES 3(1)

DEADLY VICES 1(1)
DEADLY VICES 1(2)
DEADLY VICES 2(1)
DEADLY VICES 2(2)

Envy and pride are two deadly sins closely linked to each other, both concern interpersonal attitudes: the envious person thinks that some people around him have better goods or better opportunities than him, the proud one believes that he is better than anybody around him. Both suffer from a damaged sense of identity; the first type thinks he has been denigrated by others; the second type deems himself superior to anybody around him.

Both types keep trying to preserve their self esteem in opposite ways that are also complementary; the envious one suffers from a wounded ego when he thinks that someone has any kind of advantage over him, the easiest way to compensate his pain is by diminishing or even damaging the other person’s goods. For example, if a friend has physical or moral qualities, the envious type would tend to criticize him, badmouth him or even harm him. In the case of the proud type, he would tend to protect himself keeping a distance form any kind of humiliation from the outside; secretly, this type would be offended because people cannot recognize how grand and important he is.



In both cases, the Self cannot expand itself, the creative energy remains contracted or poorly expressed; a sensation of a constant thread from the outside reduces the creative possibilities. The envious one feels that whatever he does will seem insignificant when compared to other people’s achievements, he is unable to appreciate his own qualities. The proud one feels that the world does not deserve his grandeur, but he unconsciously fears to expose his lack of talent or his dark side.

These are very painful sins, they involve shame and guilt, and very few people can recognize these vices in themselves. But as we have been insisting in the previous articles, recognition is the first step to liberate ourselves from the vice.
         
Until recently, I had thought that the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein had said all about envy in her brilliant book ‘Envy and Gratitude’, but Gabriele Taylor’s ‘Deadly Vices’ added the key I was missing to understand the nature of envy in full depth.
         
Melanie Klein discovered that envy was activated since the baby is born and starts a relationship with its mother’s breast; it is a complex theory but we can condense the main concept: the baby is trapped in a relation of power with its mother’s breast (or feeding bottle), the little voracious creature wants to possess the source of pleasure that the breast represents; when he discovers that he cannot summit it, he becomes envious and tries to destroy it. According to Ms Klein, if the baby cannot compensate this envy with feelings of gratitude, he or she will repeat this pattern in his or her adult love relationships; he will try to possess or dominate the person he loves or likes, but when he discovers that he cannot do this, he will transform love into hatred and hostility.

Gabriele Taylor goes a step forward, she advances that what provokes the hostility and destructive feelings is a sense of shame, the envious person feels that he or she has been humiliated by somebody else’s possessions or achievements; the sense of identity is severely diminished, the person feels his or her self is wounded. Taylor uses the example of Shakespeare’ play, ‘Othello, The Moor of Venice’; in it, Iago, one of the characters, is envious of Othello and weaves a net of lies, he makes him believe that Desdemona, Othello’s wife, is cheating him with a captain. Othello then kills his wife and when he discovers that she was innocent, he commits suicide. Iago is definitely a viciously envious type, but Taylor points out that the reason he hates the Moor is because he thinks he has been humiliated when Othello promoted another man in a position that Iago himself deserved.

Thus, Iago could not tolerate feeling reduced and humiliated by a man he despises (Othello). The envious type finds hard to go on living with a diminished sense of identity. This might happen so often in companies and enterprises where the employees or associates feel disqualified by their bosses or colleagues. So, in Taylor’s system, envy is activated more by a sense of opprobrium than by the need to possess what other people have.

Another brilliant account and exploration of envy can be found in ‘Cousin Bette’, a famous novel by Balzac, the same author we mentioned in the previous article.  Old maid Bette feels relegated to a second plan by her socially pretentious family, she is the poor relative; ‘I would like to make dust of them all’, declares Bette when talking about her family. And she endeavours to destroy them. Same as Shakespeare’s Iago, Bette feels she has been diminished and humiliated by what others have and she thinks she deserves more than them; she feels that life has been unfair to her and that now she has to be compensated.

The problem with Bette and Iago, and everyone attained by this deadly sin, is that they feel so wounded by other’s successes or by their own sense of exclusion and humiliation, that they lose sight of their own potential, or of other qualities they might have. The envious one is paralysed by this sense of loss of identity and cannot move on in life. Saturn, associated to this sin (error), confronts the individual to his or her own limitations. We all have disadvantages if compared to other people’s qualities or achievements; the stronger Saturn is in our chart, the stronger the sense of restriction. But Saturn’s mission is to confront us with our handicaps so that we learn to compensate with other qualities and adapt ourselves to reality. Even if we possess certain talents, limitations are all around us; Saturn wants us to survive in a world that is not made the way we wished it was made; we have to learn to surpass inner and outer restrictions. That is why kindness is the opposite virtue to envy, if we do not have gratitude for being alive, for the much or the little we have, our Self cannot blossom, the human species cannot evolve.(to be continued)

Envy and Gratitude

Melanie Klein / Free Press


Deadly Vices

Gabriele Taylor / Oxford Univ Pr (Txt)


Othello (Folger Shakespeare Library)

William Shakespeare / Simon & Schuster


Cousin Bette (Modern Library Classics)

Honore De Balzac / Modern Library


In Japanese

by xavier_astro | 2012-03-01 00:00 | 心理  

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