Creative Envy

Based on Jungian symbolic psychology, this book attributes an archetypal foundation to the ego defense mechanisms of psychoanalysis and describes the possibility that all psychological functions are creative or defensive. Analyzing Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus, Carlos Amadeu Botelho Byington describes envy as functioning creatively and defensively in the relationship between Mozart and Salieri. He demonstrates how psychoanalysis followed the biblical book of Genesis and the Christian doctrine of original sin and "scientifically" stigmatized envy. He asserts that this bias originated in severe cultural pathology, which greatly distorted the Christian myth by repressing creative envy because of its extraordinary revolutionary potential for individual and cultural development.

This book defends the thesis that envy is a normal and important function for the development of Individual and Cultural Consciousness, and that it only becomes destructive when its creative function is frustrated.

By analyzing the relationship between Mozart's genius and Salieri's creative insecurity, the author goes back to Genesis, to the concept of original sin in Christianity and to psychoanalysis to show that envy has been disdained and repressed in the history of humanity by the fear we have of our creative power. Envy is a sister of ambition. Both strive equally for development. Ambition stimulates the Ego, and envy covets what belongs to the other. Traditional Consciousness is manichaeistic and radically divides psychic functions into Good and Evil, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly. This obliges Consciousness to become unilateral, repressing the side it judges to be bad. The repressed contents form an intense shadow in the Unconscious, which are projected onto others and treated with hostility. This is the ternary and paranoid history of Humanity, in which the Ego sees Good and Evil in Others and not in itself.

At the heart of Carlos Byington's thinking is his description of the Alterity Archetype. This is a four-sided pattern of Individual and Collective Consciousness in which the Ego becomes aware of the Consciousness-Shadow polarity in itself and in the Other. The Alterity Archetype is the paradigm of Love. Creativity, Social Democracy and Sustainable Economics. It enables us to see all psychic functions. including envy, acting for Good or for Evil, in Consciousness and the Shadow of Individuals and Culture.

CARLOS AMADEU BOTELHO BYINGTON is a doctor, psychiatrist, educator and historian. He went to secondary school in the United States of America, qualified in medicine and psychiatry in Rio de Janeiro and completed his post-graduate studies at the Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. On Returning to Brazil, in 1965, Byington expanded Jung's archetypal concept to include Individual and Collective Consciousness. In 1983, by studying the sociocultural transformation process in Latin America, he formulated the Archetypal Theory of History, based on the ideas of Hegel, Jung, Bachofen, and Erich Neumann's Mythological Theory of Consciousness. According to Byington, all psychic functions are archetypal structuring functions of consciousness. He attributes a central position to envy, as important as sexuality, love, strive for power, jealousy and fear.