Self-Envy: Therapy and the Divided Internal World

Self-envy is a new term that speaks to age-old therapeutic impasses. Dr. Rafael Lopez-Corvo, a prominent South American psychoanalyst, shows that the comprehension of self-envy is indispensable for the understanding of disorders of the self that are manifested in addictions, acting out, and inhibition of creativity.
Although self-envy might at first appear to be a complicated concept to grasp, initial difficulties dissipate with the use of object relations theory, which provides us with a helpful instrument for examining the architecture of the internal world. From this perspective, we can understand behavior as influenced by the multiple interactions of early representations of self and other that operate in our inner selves. In this book, Dr. Lopez-Corvo identifies "child part self-objects," self representations from early development that remain split off from the self and harbor destructive and envious feelings toward the creative aspects of the self. Self-envy results from direct aggressive attacks by these childhood self-objects against the part of the self identified with a harmonious mother-father or parent-sibling relationship. These internal dynamics cause intense unconscious conflict, dissociation, and disturbances of the self, all of which underlie severe psychopathology, such as repetitive destructive behavior, and even the living of seemingly "normal" but constricted lives. Dr. Lopez-Corvo shows how with such patients, for whom one part of the self is ruthlessly pitted against another, interpretations should speak directly to the phenomenon of a war within the internal self.

Rafael E. Lopez-Corvo is a training psychoanalyst at the Venezuela Institute of Psychoanalysis.