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Jealousy and the podcast
Picture someone who wants a podcast of their own and listens to a friend's show. In jealousy, the thought is that the show is amazing and they want one too, and that wanting turns into motivation to go get it.
How envy hides
Envy cannot admit the wanting, because not having the thing feels shameful. It has a destructive force in it, and it works through a few moves. Devaluation puts the other person down: the show is not so great, actually it's not good at all. Idealization goes the other way: if the envious person can't become the friend, they try to become the friend's best friend and so have everything the friend has. A third move is to do something that makes the friend envious in return.
The defense shows
In each case, what shows is the defense against the feeling. Someone who devalues a friend is protecting themselves from feeling envy. Fear follows the same pattern: what shows up is usually anger or a shutdown, with the fear underneath.
Why did Melanie Klein call envy destructive?
Melanie Klein published Envy and Gratitude in 1957. She argued that envy begins in infancy, aimed at the mother's breast as the first source of everything good. In her account, the envious baby wants to spoil the thing that feeds it because the thing is not under its control. Many fellow analysts disputed that claim, and it remains one of the most debated parts of her work.
Why do people tear down a friend's success?
Psychologist Leon Festinger proposed social comparison theory in 1954, holding that people evaluate themselves by measuring against others. Abraham Tesser later built the self-evaluation maintenance model, published in 1988. It predicts that a close friend's outperformance feels threatening when it falls in a domain the person cares about. In that case people tend to distance themselves from the friend or downplay the friend's achievement.
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