While envy can produce positive outcomes, such as envisioning how one can become better (more accomplished, wealthier, more powerful, higher self-esteem), it also can produce outcomes that are quite negative. We essentially seek to bring the other person down to our level, rather than seek to rise up to their level. It is with a heart filled with envy that we point out the other person’s flaws, seek to diminish their accomplishments, or work actively to thwart their progress.
Melancholia
These are negative feelings regarding what does not exist yet resides in our consciousness. A poetic statement seems appropriate: melancholics is “sorrow to be found on the tip of an angel’s wings.” While melancholia is often associated with our mourning the death of someone we care about deeply, it can also arise regarding the death of a dream, the death of a relationship, or even the death of a vision we have for better society.
One of the most influential and disturbing concepts of melancholia comes from the writing of Sigmund Freud (1915/1957). Freud draws an important distinction between Mourning and Melancholia. He pushes well beyond the description of melancholia that I have just presented. According to Freud, while mourning is the normal, conscious process of grieving a specific loss, melancholia is a pathological form of grief. When we are mourning the loss of a loved object or person, we are gradually detaching emotional energy (libido) from it. A specific object or person is being mourned, and the detachment is finite and sometimes even transformative. Over time, the mourner accepts the loss, reinvests emotional energy elsewhere, and re-engages with the external world, allowing life to continue despite the absence of the lost object. One description of this detachment and eventual reintegration centers on our entering into the world of the dying and dead and then returning to the world of the living.
By contrast, Freud proposed that melancholia involves a loss that is often unconscious or not fully recognized. I would add to this an assumption that the loss appears not as the absence of a specific object, person or idea, but rather as a peering into the void. Everything is lost and there is no leaving the world of the dying and dead. As Freud noted, the person suffering from melancholia may be unable to identify the object of loss. To use his words (Freud, 1915/1957, p. 245):
“[In the case of melancholia] there is a loss of a[n] . . . ideal kind. The object has not perhaps actually died, but has been lost as an object of love (e.g.in the case of betrothed girl who has been jilted). In yet other cases one feels justified in maintaining the belief that a loss of this kind has occurred, but one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either . . . [H]e knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him.”
