Envy is Not Innate

A New Model of Thinking

Patricia Polledri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367324353
• eBook ISBN: 9780429913327
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book is a comprehensive revision of the notion of envy, suggesting that envy is not innate and proposing some fresh ideas about its relation to psychopathology, offering a working model of development which is highly relevant to clinical practice.

CHAPTER ONE
Historical background: a brief overview

The UK has, from a very early stage, been at the forefront of pioneering the psychoanalytic understanding of criminology. More recently, the interest in forensic psychotherapy has taken on a new impetus, partly due to the recognition of forensic psychiatry as a sub-speciality of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. The following brief description of the development of forensic services in this country gives a background to the history of psychotherapeutic treatment, and provides the context in which Kleinian and other theories were formulated.

From the Psychopathic Clinic to the International Association of Forensic Psychotherapy

The psychotherapy of those with criminal tendencies, or with a history of catastrophically dangerous behaviour, has its historical roots in this country in the appointment of visiting psychotherapists to the prisons under the auspices of the Home Office. This practice goes back prior to the Second World War and to the setting up of the Psychopathic Clinic in 1931 (renamed the Portman Clinic in 1937). This formed the clinical wing of the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency and was co-founded by Edward Glover. Glover was a pioneer in the combined field of psychotherapy and criminology publicly remembered in the annual Glover lecture, delivered under the auspices of the Tavistock and Portman Clinic NHS Foundation Trust. He was also, as we shall see, vociferously opposed to some of Melanie Klein's ideas (Cordess, 1992; Polledri, 1997).

The 1976 Report of the Butler Committee on "mentally abnormal offenders" made many important recommendations for legal and administrative changes in relation to such offenders. The extent of the Committee's recommendations (140 in all) reflects its wide terms of reference, which included consideration of, first, the criteria on which "the law should recognise mental disorder or abnormality in a person accused of a criminal offence as a factor affecting his liability to be tried or convicted, and his disposal", and second, "what, if any, changes are necessary in the powers, the procedure and facilities relating to the provision of appropriate treatment, in prison, hospital or the community, for offenders suffering from mental disorder or abnormality, and to their discharge and aftercare" (cited in British Journal of Law and Society, 1976).

In the wake of the Butler Report, the NHS undertook during the 1980s a serious review of the role of psychotherapy, and the special and dedicated work of those at the Portman Clinic and the neighbouring Tavistock Clinic was organised under a special sub-committee of the Hampstead Health Authority (the clinics were, at the time, under the management of the Hampstead Health Authority). In 1985, the Seymour Report found that, despite opposition, psychotherapy did have a continuing role to play in the NHS. Because of their standing as providers of psychoanalytic psychotherapy services and training in the NHS, the Tavistock and Portman Clinics joined forces and, as part of the restructuring of the health services, jointly became an NHS trust in 1994, whilst maintaining their separate identities.

More recently, the Portman Clinic has renewed its endeavours by providing training programmes for psychotherapeutic treatment, largely as a result of the initiatives of Dr Estela Welldon, who helped to organise the International Association of Forensic Psychotherapy, which was set up in 1991 during the XVIIth Congress of the Academy of Law and Mental Health. The objectives of the association are, among others: to develop interest in and support for forensic psychotherapy internationally to provide a means for colleagues to co-operate more easily to facilitate the flow of information; to encourage communication with members of the legal profession and others involved in the management of offenders; to contribute, through further research, to the psychoanalytic understanding of violence, perversion, and delinquency. The association has developed well, with international contributions. As Cleo Van Velsen put it:

Forensic psychotherapists are concerned with the psychodynamic understanding of the particular offender patient and, in this context, the crime becomes important as the means to understand better the psychopathology of the offender. Forensic patients uniquely demonstrate their internal worlds as with their crime they act out something of their internal object relations.

(Van Velsen & Welldon, 1997, p.5)

Insights into human behaviour

In some ways, the idea of forensic psychotherapy as a separate discipline is somewhat artificial, as many patients who enter psychotherapy emerge as having problems of maladjustment or even violence. The request to treat dangerous and offender patients is easily made, but can be very hard to follow up with consistent work, since the anxiety, strains, and responsibility of trying to prevent acting out are very great indeed. Therapists may have to terminate treatment when the impact of childhood suffering or horrific neglect and abuse suffered by the patient during their developmental years becomes too difficult to deal with in the transference (Gallwey, 1997). As these patients have no sense of self, equally they cannot have a sense of self in relation to the other; therefore transference-based psychotherapy is limited as to its effectiveness as a therapeutic tool.

Psychoanalysis attempts an investigation of the nature and cause of psychopathology as an accompaniment to treatment. It uses the analysand's increasing contact with previously inaccessible feelings and phantasies, made available to them through the carefully controlled working alliance with their therapist, the facilitator of this undertaking. This approach to crime was one of the great new optimisms that derived from Freud's work and brought inspiration to the understanding of human behaviour.

Cordess describes how:

Specific psychoanalytical models of disorders of conduct have been slow in coming. Freud gave the lead in his theories on acting out and his short paper, "Criminals from a Sense of Guilt" (1916), but these contributions were derived from observations on neurotic individuals. There had been several important psychoanalytic papers on the subject of criminality in the 1920s, notably Reik's "The Compulsion to Confess" (1925). In the course of a few pages, Freud put forward in his seminal 1916 paper the splendidly subversive hypothesis that some criminal acts are committed as a consequence of the individual's sense of (unconscious) guilt—that is, in order to assuage guilt, and not as a result of the absence of a capacity to feel guilt, as was generally assumed.

(Cordess, 1992, p. 154)

He goes on to say (p. 154) that "guilt precedes the crime, rather than the other way round".

Freud's description of a similar relationship regarding phobia in "Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety" (1926), which he describes as the work of finding an object for anxiety, had great influence and was later developed, most notably by Melanie Klein. The models for psychosis and borderline states developed by Klein (1946) in this country, and by Otto Kernberg (1975) and Heinz Kohut (1972) in the United States, have been accorded considerable explanatory force or status. I would argue, however, that this approach lacks an essential differentiation between intra-psychic and extra-psychic realms of pathological activity.

Theoretical concepts cannot always be relied upon when treating dangerous and disturbed individuals, perhaps due to the fact that their specific mental issues have to be explored and understood from their individual perspective and interpreted in their own right. The difficulties spring, in part, from the nature of the lives of many offenders, the exclusion of criminals from access to therapeutic facilities open to non-offenders, and the reluctance of trained therapists to involve themselves with this group of patients. This is perhaps due to the powerful transference and countertransference difficulties these patients mobilise during treatment and the tendency of those who have involved themselves with the treatment of this group to cling to their familiar models of psychopathology. The value of the "team" approach to management, especially in institutions, is that it facilitates the shared involvement of such "distributed transference"; this works for the benefit of the patients as well as making the emotional aspects of the job more manageable for staff, especially those in close patient contact throughout the day (Gallwey, 1997, p. 474; Polledri, 1997).

Controversy and clinical developments

As mentioned earlier, Edward Glover was a pioneer of forensic psychotherapy in this country and his theories on problems of maladjustment and crime, particularly his ideas on the role of sexual perversion as a rationalisation of psychotic phenomena through sexualisation, added a new dimension to classical Freudian theory and the development of treatment in the combined fields of psychotherapy and criminology. Amongst his most obvious and lasting achievements—aside from his clinical work and extensive publications—are his roles as co-founder of the Portman Clinic and the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency, as joint founder of the British Journal of Criminology (he was co-editor until his death), and as co-founder of the British Psychoanalytic Society. However, he very publicly and controversially resigned from the society in 1944 (Cordess, 1992).

The battle that led to Glover's 1941-45 in what became known [King & Steiner, 1991). As Cordess resignation was played out during as the "Controversial Discussions" describes:

The dispute arose from Klein's claims to have extended the scope of psychoanalytic work into the lives of very young children and, with later developments, into the theory and treatment of psychoses. Glover became the most vehement opponent of these views, and of Klein herself. He effectively cut himself off from the clinical and technical developments within psychoanalysis generated by Klein and the Kleinian group. He was therefore also largely divorced from the post-Kleinian evolution of ideas. However, the fact that Glover withdrew his energies from the Psychoanalytic Society in Britain meant that he had greater time and commitment for other activities. Most significantly, he applied some of the same energies to establishing a place for psychoanalytic thinking within the field of psychology and criminology.

(Cordess, 1992, p. 516)

The post-Kleinian evolution of conceptual and clinical ideas has been most advanced in general by such psychoanalysts as Wilfred Bion (1957 through to 1992), Herbert Rosenfeld (1987), and Hanna Segal (1957,1991, 1993,1997), working with psychotic patients. Their particular influence and its application to forensic psychiatry and psychology in Britain are exemplified by the work of Arthur Hyatt-Williams (1964, 1975, 1998, 2002). In his work with sexual murderers serving life imprisonment, Hyatt-Williams introduced the concept of the simultaneous occurrence of external stressors, acting all at once, some by pure chance, on an individual already primed to lose control because of a failure in the developmental integration of primitive aggression (1964). The relative paucity of Hyatt-Williams' and Patrick Gallwey's publications in this field has not done justice to the quality of their teaching, clinical work, and thinking (Cordess & Cox, 1996). In relation to human violence, for example, Gallwey writes: "Most psychoanalytic theories of early mental life [including Winnicott's] view it as dominated by omnipotent phantasy. Psychosis tends to be seen as a regression to these primitive omnipotent states of mind" (Gallwey, 1996, p. 154). And in discussing the paradox that is experienced by those working with patients, both male and female, who, like many criminals, have endured very great abuse, neglect, and childhood suffering, Gallwey says:

What impresses most is how well they have managed, and not so much how evil they have become. It is quite extraordinary how brave is the childhood spirit that can survive the extremes of abuse with some hope and sanity intact and keep going in spite of crippling damage during crucial periods of development.

(1996, p. 154)

Donald Winnicott describes children as using omnipotent phantasy in the creation of a transitional object as part of their external reality (1989, pp. 54-55). For Winnicott, this places a different meaning on the word "omnipotence", in which the child needs to make the transition from omnipotent control of external objects to the relinquishment of control and eventually to the acknowledgement that there are phenomena outside one's personal control.

Winnicott's experience in the forensic setting was minimal compared to Hyatt-Williams' and Gallwey's, yet his model is of great importance in our understanding that the individual can only exist in relation to "the other". This finding is crucial in our understanding of human violence. What is clear from the work of Winnicott (1960) and John Bowlby (1988) is that human beings, like all mammals, are born with an innate predisposition to form intense attachments to their primary caregivers. Klein believed that primary bonding was reliant upon omnipotent phantasy and threatened by innate destructiveness (1952, p. 65). Winnicott's work on maternal bonding and the facilitating environment (1960,1965) follows on from and develops the separation studies carried out on primitive infants and their mothers which reveals that attachment behaviour has a psychobiological structure. He concluded that an infant cannot be understood apart from its interaction with the mother. Similarly, these developmental concepts form the foundation of Gallwey's 1996 model.

CHAPTER TWO
Literature review

Starting with Envy and Gratitude (1957), I have reread Melanie Klein's work many times to facilitate my own thinking and its challenge to Klein as the primary thinker on envy. In particular, I could not really understand how any of the complicated theorising in relation to envy could be attributed to an infant. Fifteen years ago I found it impossible to present the paper I was requested to do, to a group of baffled international students with English as a second language, on the subject of psychoanalysis and attachment theory in relation to crime. Even from the copious notes I had made then, and had rewritten many times, I was struggling, and still do to this day, with the fact that there is no biological explanation to support a death instinct theory, which seems to me to be contrary to biological principles.

This view was first put forward by Ernest Jones (Rycroft, 1968), and the time has come for a review of the concept of envy from its original formulations and to present some fresh ideas about its relation to psychopathology.

The psychoanalytical concept of envy and Klein's "constitutional envy"

Although the clinical importance of the psychoanalytic concept of envy had been well established since Freud's first account of penis envy, mentioned in many of Freud's papers, two themes came into special prominence, both being linked to the distinction between the sexes. In females, it was the envy of the penis and in males it was a struggle against passivity and femininity to another male; both of these Freud (1905d) attributed to the castration complex:

The main factor in Freud's view of these phenomena as being biologically determined was a particular feeling of lack. The two most important and insurmountable obstacles to success were penis envy and masculine protest, which could be attributed to Freud's mascu-line-phallocentric vantage point, but did not do justice to later, well established clinical data.

(Feldman & De Paola, 1994, p. 219)

The broader concept of envy does not concentrate solely on penis envy and hostility with anal-sadistic character traits as a background, which are the main factors described by Karl Abraham (1919), as a form of resistance to psychoanalysis. It was only with Klein's concept of "constitutional envy" (1957) that envy became "a quasi-nuclear concept, a cornerstone in the psychoanalytic process" (Feldman & De Paola, 1994, p. 217). Klein focused her thinking on the analysis of the anxieties and defences attached to envy, but did not envisage the possibility of analysing this complex feeling in itself (Masterson, 1999). In Kleinian psychoanalysis, "the envious attacks the patients made during analysis were brought to the fore without any apparent analysis of this complex feeling, probably because of its quasi-biological status in Klein's theory. In psychoanalytic work, envy became equated with penis envy in wom...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• Dedication
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE Historical background: a brief overview
• CHAPTER TWO Literature review
• CHAPTER THREE Encapsulated containerlessness
• CHAPTER FOUR Shame and envy
• CHAPTER FIVE Self envy
• CHAPTER SIX Perverse relationships in pathological organisations
• CHAPTER SEVEN Womb envy
• SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
• REFERENCES
• INDEX