Envy in Everyday Life

Envy is as old as mankind. Crimes are committed because of envy, politics are based on envy, institutions have been designed to regulate envy and there are powerful reasons to avoid being envied by others, for example, underachieving. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein believed that envy was innate, but in Envy in Everyday Life forensic psychotherapist Patricia Polledri demonstrates that this is not the case, showing instead that envy is a form of emotional abuse: something learned due to a failure in attachment during our childhood developmental years and not something that we are simply born with. This book can be seen as the ultimate envy handbook and is a seedbed of information about envy. It covers the theoretical background to the subject, look at the ways in which envy surfaces in daily life and suggests ways of dealing with envious attacks. And lest anyone should doubt the practical consequences of envy, it provides an in-depth analysis of the trial of Oscar Pistorius for murdering his girlfriend of twelve weeks, Reeva Steenkamp. A former researcher at University College London Medical School, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences, and at the University of Sussex, Department of Law and Political Sciences, Patricia Polledri is supremely well qualified to write about envy. Her first book, Envy Is Not Innate: A New Model of Thinking, a forensic psychiatry textbook, was published in 2012. Envy In Everyday Life has been written with the general reader in mind, providing vital information about a subject that might affect any one of us.