Tratto da “Missione Salute” Anno XXX – N.1 Gennaio – Febbraio

di padre Luciano Sandrin

With envy, evil entered the world. The Bible tells us this: ‘but through the devil’s envy death entered the world, and those who belong to his party experience it’ (Wisdom 2:24). The death of divisions entered; the death that is wished on a rival; the death that tortures and slowly kills the person who feels envy. For that matter, the word ‘devil’ means specifically ‘he who divides’. Envy separates and separation generates further envy. Thus begins an interesting analysis by Giovanni Salonia, a priest and psychotherapist, in a book, written with others, which addresses the following topic: ‘e as in envy’

Envy is an emotion that opens a person to knowledge of the unexplored pathways of the human heart; it should, therefore, be understood, worked through and governed. Some say that at times envy can be positive and take as an example the famous phrase of St. Augustine: ‘If them, why not I?’ But others answer that this is called emulation. And they observe that true envy is always negative: towards what is good and beautiful and possessed by another; as I cannot have it, I do everything to destroy the person who possesses it. And the means that I can use are very many in number: slander, libel, mobbing, and yet others.

This kind of emotion is a clear sign that the person has not yet developed and worked through healthy self-esteem so as to be able to accept the gifts of the other without feeling threatened at the level of his identity. And everything begins from seeing, which slowly becomes ‘seeing in’, ‘seeing negatively’ the other as an outsider, a rival. Or even worse seeing him with ‘malevolence’. Envy is an illness of seeing. An envious spirit sees in a rigid and obsessive way only what he needs to keep his own envy alive: the envied person is seen as being far away. Envy arises from a seeing that does not behold, that does not welcome, that does not enjoy the good of the other but wants to possess what the other person has that is good, and if the envious person does not manage to do this he seeks to eliminate the person who possesses such things. This is a distorted perception that constructs poisonous and destructive relationships.

All of this can be aggravated by real injustices, or what are perceived as such, and of these life, indeed, is full. But whereas we envy the talents of others we are not aware of ours or we bury them. Given that we cannot be the most beautiful person in the kingdom, not even Snow White can be recognised and appreciated as such. Envy of what Abel possessed moved Cain’s hands, but jealousy at the ‘perceived’ preference of God for his brother also made him suffer.

What sustains envy is a search for happiness or anger at having lost it. But it is a mistake to think that one can be happy envying the happiness of others. We think that we have taken the right road but in the end we find that we are in a one-way street; our emotional navigator has led us astray. Giovanni Salonia summarises the point very well: ‘One cannot be happy comparing oneself with others or hoping that there are no happy people on the earth. If – paradoxically – an envious person managed to obtain the object that is envied, he would not become happy because, in essential terms, he does not envy the object in itself but the object that makes the other happy. One always envies, in the final analysis, the happiness of the other person: if I am not happy, nobody else should be happy’. Advertising also plays upon envy and the ‘beauty’ of being envied as a need to confirm one’s own value, a self-image that bears a patina and has social ‘utility’.

For Gestalt therapy, the psychotherapeutic approach of which our author is an acknowledged master, envy is a block or an unhealthy attempt to avoid a pathway of self-knowledge and authentic encounter with the other. Rather than recognising his own limits, the person avoids them and concentrates on what he sees pertaining to the happiness of others. Only the capacity to recognise what we are, limits included, enables us to discover our unexplored talents. An envious person does not accept his own limits.

Everything began in the Garden of Eden when the serpent ‘craftily’ insinuated the idea that not eating the apple of the tree was an arbitrary prohibition of God and not a limit inherent in being a creature. An envious person injures himself because he does not appropriate what he himself has and he does not develop. To fructify the talents that we have received is the secret and precious talent which, along the roads of gratitude, of humility, and of encountering the other, leads to our uniqueness and our fullness.

We are reminded by the Italian proverb: ‘if envy was a fever, the whole of the world would have it’. But if it is a fever, it can be the symptom of something that does not go inside us, something that should be recognised and treated.