The major work of psychotherapy is in the “being with,” a task that inevitably calls upon our resources in being with ourselves, a process that is always in development, that is, always involved with struggle, impasses, reevaluation, creative surges, disillusionment and reillusionment. To be useful to our patients in large part depends on our capacity because of her capacity to stay with our own difficult and distressing affective experience, in therapy and outside of therapy. It is the “being with” that brings affects from what we might refer to as a vapor state to condense until they achieve representability, even crystallization. Where we speak so much about affect containment, we might do well, as Erna Furman has pointed out, to speak of affect attainment. Of course, attainment and containment are two aspects of a single process.
Our involvement with others is a mystery, not in the sense that we should remain quiet about it, following some dictum like Wittgenstein’s “Of that whereof we can not speak, thereof we should remain silent,” but in the sense that, whatever we may say about it, there is always more, something about what we have said that falls short, is wrong, does not fit, raises more questions than it answers, deeply unbalances us just when we thought settling the matter (and ourselves) might actually be in our grasp or at least almost in our grasp. Of this mystery of our involvement with others envy is a large and central part, a province teeming with life and hope and despair. Envy means lack, want, desire, insufficiency, incompleteness. Envy is a means, not just an end. Envy is a process for making meanings in an interpersonal and inner personal field.
I am sitting in my office on a bright winter’s morning, listening and musing. A redhaired young woman in her middle thirties sits opposite me. Her hair is a beautiful chestnut color, maroon. I have been seeing her for many years, since she was a very suicidal young woman and now I find myself wondering whether that hair color is natural, which I know it once was, or whether it has been maintained or revised by artificial coloring. I am wondering whether the gray hairs are being kept in exile, held at bay, refused, refuted by chemical means. Of course, my own hair, what there is left of it, is not so much gray as salt and pepper. I have never dyed it, this particular set of initiatives not fitting in with my own style of submission and denial by insisting on not disturbing the natural weathering process. But I do mourn for myself as I once was, dream impossible dreams of being restored to that youthful vitality I did not know how to appreciate at the time, so busy was I with my own sorrows and grudges and ambitions.
I watch her shoulders, the way she holds herself, how her breathing lifts her chest and then lets it lapse, the way she looks at me, checks on me habitually and unobtrusively. I am wondering how it feels to inhabit her body, how it changes the shading of all perceptions, all intentions, all inventions and I am wondering, as I do habitually, what she is wondering about, what the flavor of her wondering and wandering is. She is telling me, in great detail, as she always does, a story of her everyday life, a simple interaction that is anything but simple, charged with color, texture, doubt, confusion, anxiety, hope, a tangle at once impossible and enjoyable. She is entertaining me, holding on to my attention, keeping me right here, now, also keeping herself both busy and beset in the process.
I am enjoying being entertained, finding myself glad to be with her, yet all the while aware that I have no way to convey this to her except just to go on being entertained and enjoying it. I can not step out of the frame, abstract, interpret. But it always is with me that her mother was, as she once put it, “over it” by the time that she was born, that the psychiatrist she first worked with killed herself in the midst of that treatment, that she has, although she is mostly very discrete, even polite about it, doubts about whether it is worth being involved with other people that are not only grave and deep, but also subtle, shy, elusive. I know she is lonely and that not being lonely is perhaps even more frightening to her than being lonely, because she can imagine it no other way than as merger.
But where and how, you will ask, does envy come into all this? If I were to answer something like, “Everywhere, in myriad ways,” this would be, while possibly truthful, too vague to be either helpful or instructive. So let me try to be a bit more specific, starting with my own envy. To work with envy, we must know ourselves as both envious and enviable, capable of envying as well as of being envied. My envy is present to me, first of all, as an awareness of her youth, her beauty, her vitality, even as an awareness of her lack of awareness of these things, how they are natural parts of her existence, to be taken for granted. I am only too aware of my own different state with its implications of inevitable decline. Perhaps I have lived well, but living well has taken its toll. How many regrets I have and how much I would like to have done differently and to have others have done differently as well. Regret is in my every breath, along with much else.
What of the sensual, the sexual dimensions or tensions? I wonder what it is like in her body for her. I wonder very specifically about her physicality. I watch her and enjoy watching her, even as I suspect she relishes being watched, I imagine something like being her, but am aware of how separate we are, how my imagination must necessarily fall short. There are sparks of desire, perhaps born of a wish to join, a wish to merge, stimulated not just from her side but from my own, too, a mutual longing for consolation, separate desolations, half acknowledged, starting down the pathway of revolt. I wish, at some level, I could be her, so as not to be me, knowing as I do how very inconvenient being me is. Does she long for the same thing, a way to be me as an escape route from being her? I know she has chosen boy friends like this, men she found enviably thin, a bit androgynous, but free from the weight of womanhood, artistic as she insisted for so many years she was not and could never be.
But my envy neither begins nor ends here. Like many of you, I hope, I have been the fortunate recipient of imperfect, irritating, nurturing, even lifesaving and inspiring psychotherapeutic attention. I have been listened to, listened with, spoken to in ways I only dimly imagined as a child struggling with my own limitations and confusions, with my parents and their histories and history, itself, a monstrous hobnailed boot on all our tongues, with a wider world more bent on ignorance than anything much else. I envy my patient, above all else, her subtle, persistent, insistent utterly legitimate and yet also sad and tragic claim on my attention. I know what it costs me when I am tired, when I am worried, when I am grieved, on the days when I have even so silly and banal a reminder of my mortality as a common cold. I envy her the care I give her, which emanates at least in part from the care I have gotten which I needed, which is, inevitably, no more what it once. I envy the good I give (which I always fear may not be good enough) because my greed shows me to myself always poorer than I actually may be. So a bit more self admiration might free me from the toils of this envy, or at least loosen their shackles, but I fear becoming fatuously vain, which I would like to be, if only because I imagine it to be simpler.
From her side, it seems to me that she sees me as more assured than I am, that she both loathes and loves me for this peculiar way of seeing that she has, so that I feel at once compelled to disillusion her and barred from doing so, except gently, at least when my patience holds. Over the years, she has proposed over and over again that some other, usually a figment of her imagination, was more favored than she in my eyes, putting me in a devilishly difficult position. If I disagreed with her she doubted my word., accused me of a familiar sort of insincerity, namely, saying what I imagined she wanted to hear. If I simply let the argument pass and watched what she did with it, she took this as a tacit confession of disfavor on my part and responded with a degree of hurt that was life-threatening. In a sense, she wanted to give me life and death power over her, then envied me desperately for my imagined possession of such power and my calm about possessing it. Only very recently has she made a start on talking on how neglect may be a blessing because it allows a clear field for realistic observation.
She is at work this particular morning on telling me a facet of a very complicated story about a woman friend of hers who was enormously, even unforgivably helpful to her last summer while I was on vacation. She had not imagined that this woman could envy her her warmth, her creativity, her effort to articulate a life of her own. She envies the other woman because she has the two things my patient herself most wants, an apparently successful relationship and an apparently successful career. She does not doubt appearance until I ask her whether it is possible that her friend somehow helps her to be so envious because the friend herself may doubt the reliability of relationship or career. It is not lost on me (nor, I am sure, on her) that I have both a relationship and a career, myself. My patient is able to talk about distrusting her friend for trying to get her to feel things the friend can not bear. She talks about the friend’s excessive curiosity about her and her romantic life, as if she wished to participate vicariously in it, or, even beyond that, to steal it. My patient tells me she has been able to thank her friend for being so helpful last summer, even as she debates within herself whether the price is not too high to justify continuing the relationship.
The patient’s relationship with her mother, a woman who was too interested and not interested enough, hard to hold on to and never willing to let her out of her grasp, stymied internally and demanding that her daughter re-supply her with her own warmth and creativity, is scattered throughout this morning’s session. It might even be fair to say it is scattered through this session of mourning, with me taking the role of the mother in a variety of ways, feeling envious of the care I was giving her, feeling over the hill with a sense of my own diminishing vitality, feeling a diffuse discomfort with the patient’s claim on me. Hopefully, awareness of this as well as awareness of my own genuine pleasure and interest in the patient make important differences.
Elsewhere, using material from this same treatment, I have discussed issues involved in learning to come to grips with the complex other, what I called there resolving the Other complex, so that instead of the shadow of the object falling on the ego, the ego can grow in the light of the object. Envy always involves a comparison that finds the self wanting. It can be very helpful if it guides us by telling us what we want, what we lack, without rendering us so desperate that we need to try to steal from others. A certain degree of stability in self and other representations is essential to the fruitful experiencing of envy. Conversely, a certain capacity to buffer the bitterness of envy is required to produce this stability. Working with envy requires our being able to listen and speak, to receive and transmit both from near enough and far enough so that the patient and the therapist are together and apart in the metabolism of envy, without falling into endless shamed and shaming silences that make secrets out of what both feel. What makes the fundamental difference is not so much what we say but how we are with ourselves and with our patients. This, of course, is our fundamental interpretation of life, something so variegated and integrated that our embodiment of it is the only name worthy of it.